OF EDUCATION 



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Eic&arfc Eo^ers 33atofter 



THE ARTS OF LIFE. 

i6mo, flexible leather, $1.25, net. 
OF BUSINESS. 
OF POLITICS. 
OF RELIGION. 

Each, i6mo, 50 cents. 
OF EDUCATION. 

i6mo, 75 cents. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
Boston and New York. 



OF EDUCATION 



€^e arts of life 




OF EDUCATION 




WITH APPENDED ADDRESSES ON 

"THE SCHOLAR" AND "THE 

COLLEGE OF TO-DAY" 




BY 




RICHARD ROGERS BOWKER 




9Hf 




1111 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

@tf)t fttoer#&e $re£& Cambribge. 
1903 





THE LIBRA 
CONG RE 


RY OF 


Two C • 


deceived 


APR 24 


1903 


Copyright Entry 
CLASS ^ XXc. No 
COPY B, ' 



COPYRIGHT, 1900 AND 1903, 

BY RICHARD ROGERS BOWKER. 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 






CONTENTS 



PAGE 

proem: the scholar . . . . . vii 

OF EDUCATION ...... I 

THE SCHOLAR : THE MAKING AND THE USE OF 

HIM . . .46 

THE COLLEGE OF TO-DAY J$ 



PROEM 

THE SCHOLAR 

The Scholar, where stands he ? Ill for the State 
If, weakening in the strife, and short of sight, 
He let the world wag on and shirk the fight. 

Well for us all if brave, compelling Fate, 

A lighthoused rock, steadfast he stand and straight. 
Holdfast the faith, make manifest the light. 
For this is he, who, strong in wisdom 's might, 

Is Teacher, Prophet, Leader consecrate. 

With star-eyed science he sees th? infinite small, 
And with faith? s vision looks beyond the seen, 

Notes from one germ evolve the myriad all 

And the Shall Be unfold from the Has Been. 

So, doubting not, but wise all things to prove, 

He sights the stars and knows the world does move. 




OF EDUCATION 

[HE first of the arts of life is edu- 
cation, the leading forth of the Education 
human faculties, in the child, f^o? VO " 
the youth, the man, as Na- 
ture makes ready. As Nature 
evolves, man should educate. Education must 
be in even step with evolution. In leading 
the child we must follow Nature. When 
Miss Sullivan, whose own sealed eyes had 
been opened to the light, was sent to open 
the sealed soul of Helen Keller, after she had 
studied all Dr. Howe had told of Laura Bridg- 
man, Mr. Anagnos asked, in test of her, how 
she would teach the child. " I do not know," 
she said; "I will let the child teach me." 
She had proved her fitness, for she voiced 
the watchword of true education. In teach- 
ing the child, we must learn from Nature, 
from child-nature. Thus the human atom is 
fitted into its place in the great universe. 
Looking forward to the successive stages 
of development, the experience of parents, 
or teachers, should become pre-vision and 
pro-vision for the children. It is thus the 
race climbs, as each generation rises one 
step higher on the accumulations of past ex- 
i 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

perience. If it does not rise, it falls ; and 
so nations decline, and fall, and are blotted 
out. 

In the beginning the child has no personal 
Experience responsibility ; its birth follows the birth of 
theChild t ^ ie ^ a ^ e at a cons iderable distance. It is only- 
well toward maturity that this becomes com- 
plete : indeed it is a prime purpose and test of 
education to produce personal responsibility. 
But education begins with birth, nay before 
birth. The highest product, man, is slowest 
in pre-natal development and in shifting for 
itself after birth. Thus the experience gained 
by the parents is stored in the child, to an 
extent broadly dividing man from his fellow 
animals. Nature is here a banker, and ad- 
vances to each generation the parental care 
it is expected to pay back through the gen- 
eration succeeding. 

The first duty of parentage, thus, is of 
The Duty of educating self to educate the child ; and this 
Parentage mus t properly begin before the birth of the 
child, that the infant, the unknowing, may be 
met with knowledge. When a fern comes 
from the ground, it appears as a queer little 
wad, which presently unfolds and unrolls ac- 
cording to the laws of fern-kind into full 

2 



OF EDUCATION 

frondage, as the gardener fore-knows it will 
do, but as few others could foresee. The 
child has a like development, according to 
the laws of humankind, which it is the busi- 
ness of the parent to fore-know. These laws 
can be learned, and the dim and partial know- 
ledge of instinct or of half-remembered ex- 
perience is by no means a substitute to excuse 
the parent from the responsibility of intelli- 
gent study. 

For here, even as elsewhere, Nature may 
not distinguish between ignorance and crime. Fatherhood 
The laws of life are, above all, inexorable. 
The inevitable doom for their transgression 
is hard — alike whether it be innocent or pur- 
posed. Of all relations, that whose conse- 
quences are visited, for good or ill, unto the 
third and fourth generation, — nay, through- 
out all generations to come, — is least fore- 
known. The man scarcely faces fatherhood 
as a conscious end. As a college boy, no 
training is too costly, no self-denial too diffi- 
cult, no studious care and temperance of body 
too hard, through weeks, months, and years, 
for the winning of the race whose immediate 
outcome is but the triumph of a day. But 
when he enters the lists of a man's responsi- 
bilities, intoxicate with love, or choosing in 
3 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

colder motive the fulfiller of life, he gives to 
marriage no such care of knowledge, or of 
training, or of foreseeing, in body or in mind, 
and he perchance foredooms her who is dear- 
est to him and those who shall be nearest to 
him, of his flesh and his blood, to defeat and 
shadow and despair in that race of life which 
he has lost for them before it is begun. The 
Motherhood wife, indeed, consciously faces motherhood, 
in the sweet prophecy of the little life which 
she enfolds, yet, too late, she also finds her- 
self unknowing, unprepared. In this great 
mystery of the tenderest, the holiest, the 
most far-reaching of all the relations of life, 
the relation between the youth who is to be 
father and the maiden who is to be mother, 
our modern teaching and all our loving care 
have so far failed to find how, without rend- 
ing the veil of modesty and mystery, to give 
to these two, with each other, the fore-know- 
ing which we provide in our stock-raising for 
the brute beasts or which Nature implants 
in them as instinct. But to this need, which 
science, with its doctrines of heredity, more 
and more emphasizes, the answer will come 
as the need is fully seen. 

Those are among the greatest benefactors 
4 



OF EDUCATION 

of the race, who, from Pestalozzi, with his The Refor- 
divinings and his so human mistakes, and Education 
Froebel, with his noble devotion, have labored 
to teach the teachers this first of the arts of 
life, by investigating what these laws of de- 
velopment are. These are the Columbus, 
the Galileo, the Newton, the Luther, of the 
child's world ; Protestants for childhood, they 
have prepared and preached a Reformation 
in which, here also, Nature, freedom, individ- 
uality, are vindicated. For there have been 
terrible mistakes. Nature tells the child to 
touch, to observe, to test, to ask questions, 
to imitate ; but a belittled Pope bulled and 
bullied in the household. It was " don't 
touch ; " " do as Papa or Mamma (or more ig- 
norant nurse) says, and don't ask Why ; " 
" keep quiet ; " " little folks should be seen 
and not heard ; " and for imitation what ex- 
ample could be worse than the fallible frailty 
of brutal Infallibility? The child's Why, 
that divining-rod which is Nature's gift to 
the little explorer, brought no answering 
spring of living water from the parental rock. 
"Because," was a finality, and crushed the 
childish mind. And when to this chill frost 
upon the wee, outreaching, tender plant, there 
was added the scarce lesser wrong of revers- 
5 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

ing Nature's order, of teaching the science 
before the art, grammar before speech, it was 
only because Nature is strong and well in- 
trenched, that children learned despite their 
teachers. That within the passing generation 
we have come to see our mistakes, to inquire 
of Nature, to follow her better way, is per- 
haps that for which the future should be, and 
will be, most thankful to us. The great ad- 
vance that has been made may best be seen by 
using as the milepost on the path of progress 
that most useful of teachers of a generation 
ago, Herbert Spencer's " Education," which 
teaches us also how much we have yet to 
learn and to do. 

The end of education is to make a whole 
The Human man, full-rounded, in soul, in mind, in body. 
Tri-unity. Health, wholeness, holiness, are from the 
same root, in fact as in word. The hale or 
whole man, integer vitae, is the man of phy- 
sical perf ectness, of moral and spiritual fulfill- 
ment, of intellectual completeness. A sound 
body is a first need, because the higher 
must build and have basis on the lower. A 
sense of right, of the moral order, is the next 
need, as the guide of life. Intellectual de- 
velopment is the complement of these. 
6 



OF EDUCATION 

The ship must have sound hull and right 
ballast, true compass and straight rudder, if 
it is to take cargo and bring it to port. A 
true education regards this human tri-unity 
and interweaves these several strands in the 
loom of life. Thus it equips the man and 
develops character. 

If, thus, the ideal and aim of humanity is 
fullness of life, a first care must be for a a sound 
sound body. "To be a good animal" — this Bod y 
js the safest foundation for good morals and 
good mind. He is most a man who has the 
greatest quantity and best quality of life for 
the longest time, who has most life through- 
out most years. To lose years by too early 
death, or months by induced disease, or 
weeks by invited illness, or hours by distract- 
ing pain, and to lose money (alas, to most 
men a more marketable motive !) by the pos- 
itive methods of long doctor's bills or the 
negative methods of enforced idleness — all 
such forfeiture of life is indeed too often sins 
of the parents visited upon the children, sins 
of careless omission and brutish ignorance 
and even reckless defiance of known law that 
are no less crimes because statute law cannot 
reach them. Alas, that the innocent must 
7 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

suffer ! For Nature heals, but she cannot 
forgive. Yet through this suffering unmer- 
ited, merited punishment comes at last to the 
guilty also, in sad harvest of misery and of 
sorrow and of loss. Physical education is 
thus the sine qua non before moral and be- 
fore intellectual education; and the parent 
must set himself to know the laws of animal 
life and of its environment, in which last such 
miserable pettinesses as plumbing are, sad to 
say, not safely to be passed by. 

Indeed, as a question of morals, a first. 
The Physi- duty is the physical duty of health. " Health 
Hea?th ty ° f ^ s tne religion of the body." " Breaches of 
the laws of health are physical sins." The 
modern view of health is wholesomeness. 
The old truth, sana mens sano corpore, we 
now read more widely and wisely : Sana 
mens, sanum corpus. A sound body is quite 
as much, if not more, conditioned in a sound 
mind, as a sound mind upon a sound body. 
A right discipline of mind, a wholesome men- 
tal attitude, often forestalls bodily ills and, 
in a sense, prevents pain. The mind con- 
trols a machine in which it lives, called the 
body. " While this machine is to him," 
man lives. It is his business, his duty, to 
preserve this machine in working order. If 
8 



OF EDUCATION 

it stops, his mortal life is ended. If some 
parts break, or rot, or wear, his body is crip- 
pled ; if other parts, his mind is obscured, 
loses control, is "lost." This body, like all 
flesh, has in it the possibilities of decay, 
and " germs " innumerable and forces mani- 
fold menace it from within and from with- 
out. 

To the diseased mind, studying disease, it The 
seems rather hopeless to try to live. A re- S 6 ^ 8 ,? of 
tired physician, in the morbidity of idleness, 
occupied himself by " having diseases." 
But to the sane mind, whole, wholesome, 
holy, it is the principle of life that conquers. 
The single and sufficing security against 
disease germs is in the vital soundness, or 
wholeness, which resists their attack in ad- 
vance, — like an alert garrison in a strong 
fort, whose well-defended walls an enemy can 
neither scale nor shatter. Vitality resists, 
survives ; death is swallowed up in victory of 
life. Life resurrects itself, rises triumphant 
again over all. The wise machinist's care is 
to prevent his machine from breaking, rather 
than to repair it after breaking. Regimen, 
the rule of good, is better than remedy, the 
cure of ill. Drugs are but repair make- 
shifts ; the wise physician, the master-ma- 

9 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

chinist of the body, sets himself to keep the 
body whole. 

The good engineer is he whose engine is 
Health not least out of service and who has least cost of 
fromDis- repairs, because he fore-sees, provides against 
ease strain by looking to his fuel, water, oil, and 

keeping his machinery in running order. 
And this he does not do by studying broken- 
down engines and developing a morbid fear 
of accident : he must simply know weak 
points, curves and crossings, " look out " and 
" take care." So health is not learned, by 
child or adult, from disease, by introspective 
study of morbid conditions, but from the 
laws of life, by outlook and care-taking. 
We need to know the human machine as 
the engineer knows his engine, to provide 
against strain by looking to our food, regi- 
men, and storage of vitality : but the studies 
of anatomy and physiology should give con- 
fidence in life-power, not fear of death. 
The true physician is an apostle of life, a 
minister to the mind, a physician of the soul 
— with the cheerful presence that brings 
life and light and not discouragement and 
gloom. In epidemic the dauntless mind 
keeps the body sane, and escapes contagion. 
The heat of fever is overcome by coolness of 
10 



OF EDUCATION 

mind. Courage conquers in the face of death. 
An Arab tradition tells that where plague 
kills one, fear kills ten. 

The like is true even with the tottling 
child. A child is naturally happy, in body Brave 
as in mind. Its little bodily troubles pass M ° ther 
by as fleeting clouds, if over-anxiety does brave 
not emphasize them to the mind. It tries c 
to walk : it falls. The wise mother, brave 
and not fearful, takes this as matter-of- 
course : so, then, does the child. Up, with 
a smile, even if it hurts a bit — and try it 
again 1 That is Nature's way of teaching to 
walk — there is nothing to cry about ! The 
unwise mother, over-anxious, catching the 
weakling to her arms, concentrates its at- 
tention upon the hurt, congesting the blood 
there by the mental act, invents or magni- 
fies for the child sense of fear and pain, and 
so thwarts provident Nature. Thus, the 
"cry-baby!" Brave mother makes brave 
child, and it is the fearless who conquers. 
Achilles, Arthur, Siegfried, Parsifal, the 
fearless, the guileless, can be conquered only 
by guile or by their own sin. 

And Nature means us to be healthy — 
whole of body. The head of a babies' hospital 
witnesses that most children are born well. 
ii 



Nature 
means us 
to be 
healthy 



Sowing 
Seeds of 
Death 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

The apple bloom is always sweet, though the 
tree be gnarled. Despite ills of heredity and 
distortions from pre-natal life, infants have 
commonly a working capital of life and health. 
Nature does her best to give each of her 
children a fair chance. It is by ill treatment 
that they are made ill. It is ignorance, or 
carelessness, or viciousness, that fore-dooms 
so many to early death, or to death-in-life, — 
the lack of knowledge, or of thought, or of 
love. It is too often by the parent that the 
seeds of death are sown. Swathed and 
pinned, jounced and churned, the wee folk 
are denied the free and quiet development of 
Nature. And as their bodies are pinched, so 
are their tempers thwarted by ignorant par- 
ents. Nature indeed teaches the infant to 
do valiant battle for life, and often it suc- 
ceeds and survives against all disadvantage. 
But what waste of life we might and should 
avoid ! It is not possible to all to dower 
their children with the best conditions of 
life, — alas, ignorance or poverty forbids ! — 
but what shall be said of those who, having 
before them all possibilities, give instead of 
bread a stone — those mothers and fathers 
in homes of education, of wealth, of ease, 
who, careless of the lives given to their care, 
12 



OF EDUCATION 

bring upon them, too late for cure, the curse 
of broken law ? 

Happy the child to whom a fair start in life 
is given, by wise parents and wise teachers Physical 
— for whom the call of nature for food is ?^? lop- 

ment 

met in even regularity, making abstinence 
and long waiting more possible in adult life 
when stress comes, with the sufficient, nutri- 
tious, and varied diet nature demands for the 
growing body ; for whom fit clothing, ruled 
not by foolish fashion but by natural sense, 
supplies protection and warmth, so that food, 
needed for growth, is not wasted for mere 
heating of the body ; for whom warm housing, 
in its turn, saves waste and harmful exposure, 
while open-air outing, pleasurable exercise, 
and natural sport give to the body, and later 
to the mind, what we rightly call free play. 
As the child becomes youth these habits of 
childhood make self-reliance more easy, and 
give the right trend for adult life. Thus it 
is made ready to master, unfearing but cau- 
tious, its physical self and the physical forces 
of external nature, — water, in swimming and 
rowing ; animals, in riding and driving ; 
weapons, in eye-and-hand practice ; mechan- 
ical forces, in the wheel and the ball. This 
physical training is in itself moral discipline, 
13 



Education 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

as is all Tightness, the evident answer of ef- 
fect to cause. 

The moral education of infancy and child- 
Moral hood is still more a matter of parental re- 
sponsibility, a more difficult matter also be- 
cause it demands not only knowledge but 
virtue, and that most difficult of virtues, self- 
restraint. The child adopts the motives of 
its elders, and its ethics are the ethics of 
home exemplars. And nowhere is that fine 
law of Nature, that demand creates supply, 
more finely illustrated : in many a household 
"a little child shall lead them," its elders, 
into what we accurately call exemplary con- 
duct. The parent is the god of the child. 
From father and mother, by imitation, it gets 
its first standards of conduct, its first motives 
of ethics, its first religion. Whether we will 
or no, the child has its direction given it at 
the start by its parents, as the rifle gives aim 
to the bullet. Injustice to a child is the 
most cruel of wrongs. The revolt in a child's 
heart when wrong is done it, when it is pun- 
ished for what it did not mean to be wrong, 
or for what it did not do, or because the 
parent is out of temper, warps its being, and 
gives it the first impulse of rebellion against 
14 



OF EDUCATION 

law, against Nature, against God. Nay, this 
does worse ; for it confuses the very idea of 
law, confounding it with brute force and 
causeless will. The parental responsibility 
for physical and moral education therefore 
cannot be evaded by the parent, or dele- 
gated to the Genius of Ignorance in however 
neat a white cap, or even to the most just 
and skilled of teachers. The parent cannot 
shirk this duty, for it is the foundation duty 
of parenthood. Likewise in the nurse and in 
the teacher, character is the first requisite. 
As a little child catches a brogue from a 
nurse while it learns to talk, so it will catch 
character, and develop in love or in hate. 
The teacher of morals must himself be the 
exemplar of justice. 

The true moral education goes back of the 
Mosaic Decalogue, " Thou shalt not," to " Thou 
Nature's One-Law, sterner yet more kindly, 
"Thou canst not." It is for the child to 
learn, by reiterated experience, — as that 
fire burns, that a mother's word is kept, that 
edge-tools cut, that a lie hurts, — that effect 
follows cause, that transgression involves re- 
tribution, that law rules. The universe is 
morally ordered, under the rule of law. 
This is the first principle of moral education. 
15 



canst not " 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

Every school must be a school of law and 
every teacher a lawgiver. 

Nature is relentless, and awards sure 
Nature is penalty for broken law. This also the child 
relentless must j eani) m p rac tice rather than by pre- 
cept. The one thought of parental discipline 
should be, not punishment, but cor-rection, 
righting the child. All penalty should be 
the logical and necessary result of the child's 
act ; if it willfully breaks a toy, it loses the 
use of that toy and of other toys that it might 
break ; if it is rude to playmate or mother, it 
must suffer for the time the loss of compan- 
ionship — and so on, through the calendar of 
child-crimes. The one aim of moral educa- 
tion should be to produce self-government in 
accord with natural law. 

The child, just at home, just in play, just 

The Law of at school, becomes the just man, recogniz- 

J* 1 f£ lteous " ing and regarding Law. As the great law 

of justness, of righteousness, is learned by 

its children, a nation becomes stanch and 

strong and great, for all history teaches that 

the rise and the fall of nations result from 

conditions — of simple and steadfast virtue 

at the beginning, of luxurious unmorality or 

immorality at the end — that are above all 

moral conditions. Names mean little. A na- 

16 



OF EDUCATION 

tion is not Christian unless its citizens are in 
deed followers of the Christ. A nation is 
not moral unless its citizens recognize cause 
and effect, right and wrong, in private and 
in public affairs. If our churches teach 
our boys to play at war, and our ministers 
condone unrighteousness ; if our economists 
preach that trade is war and that each nation 
is in commerce the enemy of each other; 
if our workingmen teach that a man must 
surrender his moral judgment or be denied 
work as an enemy, — we may prate peace, 
but war comes. And through the home, the 
school, the church, the state, all teaching 
must be based on the fact that health of 
body, rightness of soul, are the physical and 
moral foundation on which true living must 
rest, and without which mere truth of intel- 
lect is of no avail. For education must above 
all teach how to live, in wholeness of life, 
and it is on such education that a democracy 
must rest and a republic endure. 

We speak of physical, intellectual, moral 
education ; but from the beginning Nature The Inter- 
develops each in an interweaving of all. Education* 
Nature has no sharp lines : she does not 
separate landscapes, classes, knowledges, — 
17 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

she merges one into another. Thus physical, 
moral, intellectual education go hand in hand. 
The physical education of the sense-organs 
is the start of intellectual, as well as of moral 
education. Of itself the child learns motion 
— to use its limbs, to balance its body, to 
creep, to stand, to walk, to climb. The child, 
like all animals, is inquisitive. It puts things 
in its mouth and to its nose ; it touches what 
is within reach of the hand ; it is interested 
to see and hear what is within range of 
eye and ear. Thus it learns for itself tastes, 
smells, forms, sounds — in a word, facts. 
These facts it puts together, compares — and 
at once sense-observation is supplemented 
by thought-observation. With comparison 
Thinking thinking begins. That which yields to the 
egins hand, that which does not ; that which is 

within reach of the hand, that which is not ; 
that which shines to the eye, that which does 
not — give thoughts of hard and soft, near 
and far, light and shade. Qualities are dis- 
tinguished. The object present is compared 
with the object past. With association, mem- 
ory begins. Here already are the rudiments 
of intellectual education. The child also, 
like many animals, is imitative. It seeks to 
match with the voice what it hears with the 
1 8 



OF EDUCATION 

ear. Thus it learns speech and learns song, 
as art, not as science. It delights in pictures 
and forms, and likes to make them, and thus 
begins to learn drawing and modeling. It 
counts and arranges objects, and thus mathe- 
matics and classification begin. Meantime, 
the child learns, naturally, — that is by pro- 
cess of nature, — other kinds of lessons. By 
sour tastes, noxious smells, the burn of a fire, 
the hurt of a fall, Nature gives warning, and 
tells it to avoid ill, to respect gravitation. 
From the persistent relation and succession 
of facts, the notions of fitness and unfitness, 
cause and effect, right and wrong, begin. 
Here again are the very rudiments of moral 
education. All this is Nature's doing — she 
does this for the infant savage, indeed she 
does much of it for the infant animal. 

But Nature, always prodigal, does this at 
unnecessary cost and waste. A wise teach- A wise 
ing saves and safeguards. It puts the world- J^ves™ 5 
experience of the race at the service of the Waste 
newcomer. It is not well that a child should 
be burned by the fire or bruised by a fall ; 
this is costly and wasteful. Moreover the 
senses must be righted. The child sees the 
trees tossing in the wind, and thinks the 
trees churn the wind ; the savage sees the sun 

19 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

obscured by a cloud or by eclipse, and thinks 
the cloud or an unseen demon has devoured 
it ; the ancients saw the sun set, and thought 
it sank in the ocean and went under the 
earth ; the moderns still see the earth as the 
great center of the heavens, surrounded by 
shining points of light. The larger vision, 
the wider experience, must correct these 
natural errors of the uneducated senses. 
Also, there are two sides of the objects and 
forces of nature. Water cleanses and solves 
for us ; fire warms us and cooks our food ; 
gravitation holds all things together. Yet 
water drowns ; fire burns ; gravitation crushes. 
The ministrants of life become the ministers 
of death. To safeguard against ill, to utilize 
the good, without cruel experience, is also an 
achievement of teaching. 

As we face intellectual education, several 
Intellectual questions as to the purposes, methods, and 
results of " schooling " at once confront us. 
Is there in the child's mind an order in which 
the faculties develop? Should all children 
then be taught the same things in the same 
order or should each child come to its own in 
its own way ? Should education equip the 
child with knowledge, that is, facts, or with 
20 



Education 



OF EDUCATION 

discipline, that is, training ? Is there an 
order in which knowledges have worth, and 
does this order correspond to the develop- 
ment of faculties ? Is the educated man after 
all better equipped for actual life than the 
" self-made man " ? All these questions con- 
verge to a single focus and have one answer, 
if we can answer the all-embracing question, 
" What is true education ? " For a true edu- 
cation is in fact that which, keeping pace 
with the general order of development of the 
child-mind, answers the need of each child, 
by giving facts in their true relations, know- 
ledge disciplined into wisdom, in the order in 
which knowledges are of most worth, and 
thus affording all, and more than, the advan- 
tages of the self-made man, without waste 
and loss. 

At the age of maturity, Nature notifies 
by certain external signs that sexuality, hith- The Facul- 
erto passive, has become active. None the o^Age* 16 
less the several faculties, intellectual as well 
as physical and moral, have their times when 
they come of age. Nature provides for de- 
velopment of the child in due order, and a 
true education follows Nature's order. To 
blunt Nature's keenness, and to thwart her 
methods, — as to teach grammar before lan- 

21 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

guage, — is the greatest mistake possible to 
education and " civilization," the sin against 
the holy spirit of child-life. We find that 
faculties develop in the child-mind in due 
order, an order uniform in succession though 
not parallel in time, and of consistent and ra- 
tional evolution, in the case of every child, not 
bereft of its complement of senses and facul- 
ties, born into the world. The child asks in 
succession "What?" "How?" "Why?" — 
the question of fact, the question of relation, 
the question of cause. None of us indeed live 
What, How, long enough to know all the " What ? " but 
Why ? it is not long before the child begins to ask 

" How ? " and to learn of method and rela- 
tion. At last it asks " Why ? " and begins 
to learn of cause. " What is it ? " " What is 
it like ? " "What made it ? " are the child's 
touchstones. The basis of intellectual edu- 
cation is, in this sense also, physical educa- 
tion : the senses, not the reason, are first 
called upon ; the first requisite is that the 
child shall see, hear, touch, taste, smell, i. e. y 
observe truly. This truth of sense-observa- 
tion, in itself a moral education, becomes in 
due course accuracy of thought-observation, 
in obtaining and coordinating the data for 
sound judgment, — so that the early need of 

22 



OF EDUCATION 

the child is also the final need of the man of 
large affairs, in business organization or in 
concerns of state. 

The child, like the man, needs facts first. 
Facts are the food, the fuel of the mind. The Storing 
The engine must carry its store of coal, of of Facts 
water, of oil : otherwise its direction is of no 
avail. A wise teaching selects facts, sup- 
plies more facts, and puts them in proper 
relation. These facts, the child compares, 
by likeness and difference, associates, assim- 
ilates, organizes — until in this very setting 
forth of related facts in due order, the mind 
is trained to reproduce them in like related 
order as material for new judgments. The 
" meaning " of facts becomes evident. In 
due course the senses are supplemented by 
" instruments : " the eye is trained to keen 
distinctions of color and tint by help of prism 
and color-films, the ear by tuning-fork and 
water-glasses. Facts are put together and 
taken apart : synthesis and analysis prove 
each other. In this way, facts are not 
dumped into the brain as a heap of rubbish — 
nor is the child required to swallow diction- 
ary or directory, to clutter the brain-chambers 
with useless knowledge, as names of forgotten 
kings, days of battles, numbers of troops. 
23 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

To the mind as to the body, that food should 
be supplied which can be properly digested. 
Nature invites this method of learning by 
Learning by association — it is her method. The domain 
of knowledge, the kingdom of Nature, is an 
organized kingdom — ordered, coordinated : 
not, as childhood used to be taught, a scrap- 
heap of facts. One thing not only follows 
another, but follows from another. Beasts, 
birds, fishes, and plants, sounds and colors, 
have correlations within and across their 
kingdoms ; the mental process of organization 
finds correspondence in nature. The child 
no longer need learn a hundred names of 
fishes, a hundred of birds, a hundred of 
beasts, as isolated facts ; it can be taught, in 
half the time, how the fish, developing after 
its kind into many kinds, in likeness and un- 
likeness, develops presently into the bird, 
and this into the beast, the mammalia, man ; 
and as the learning mind itself develops into 
adult life, it is brought face to face with that 
wonderful and culminating fact in biology, 
that each human life in its pre-natal history 
follows the same order. Thus knowledge is 
taught by that principle of association which 
is the primal law of memory. To fit a newly 
seen bird or plant into its place is to know it 
24 



OF EDUCATION 

better than by name. As, in the words of 
Agassiz and Goode, a great museum is a col- 
lection of labels illustrated by specimens, so 
a well-educated intelligence is a collection 
of mental relations illustrated by individual 
facts. Thus, though knowledges increase, 
mastery of them is easier, because the key of 
the treasure-house is one key, not many keys. 
Classification is the labor-saving tool of the 
mind. Thus knowledge of facts becomes 
disciplined into wisdom, good sense. And 
the pupil of to-day learns more, in less time, 
with half labor, than the child of the genera- 
tion addressed by Herbert Spencer's book on 
" Education." 

In the memory-chambers of the brain, the 
senses in fact store impressions, one by one, Memory 
until these senso-graphs rival the collections l ^X^f xzzX 
of a great library, gallery, and museum. Each 
collection starts with a few things. As books 
begin to come into a library, they may be put 
upon the shelves as they happen to come. 
But presently, as more come, there must be 
arrangement — the librarian can no longer 
put his hand upon each book separately. If 
he has had no library education, he may put 
together all the books whose titles begin with 
"A," "An," or "The." Or, he may try a 
25 



tion 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

more sensible alphabetizing by titles, without 
these meaningless tags. Or, he may arrange 
his books according to the names of authors. 
But, if he is to have a real working-library — 
one where people come not to " get a book " 
but to get knowledge — he finds he must 
Classifica- have a classification by subjects, either di- 
rectly on his shelves, or indirectly in a subject- 
catalogue. Each subject becomes at last a 
special library. Soon the librarian finds that 
some books are out-of-date and seldom called 
for. These he puts on less accessible shelves, 
and brings to the front the " live " books, to 
be of easy access to the seeker. Last year's 
newspaper, the ephemeral book, is stowed 
away out of sight and "out of mind." Col- 
lection becomes but a means for selection. 
At last, the great library, recognizing that 
it can never be complete, supplements itself 
by knowledge of other libraries, through cat- 
alogues, bibliographies, indexes, — and its 
final triumph, in the " evaluation " of books, 
is to produce at once the best book of its 
subject, or to tell where it can be had. 

So in a well-ordered mind, the senses store 

data, arranged by the method of association 

in a subject-classification, and these can be 

called for at will, combined and applied to 

26 



OF EDUCATION 

practical use. The brain is closely analogous The Brain a 
to a photographer's store-room, connected Tl 1615 * 10 ??, 
with a telephone " central." We know almost and Photo- 
nothing of the physical nature of the brain ftoreUoom 
senso-graphs, nor do we know the limits of 
brain-capacity to receive and store such im- 
pressions. The phrenologists assign specific 
parts of the brain as the seat of specific func- 
tions, and physiologists locate the nerve- 
centres of the several senses ; but of the real 
records in brain-cells, we are and may always 
be ignorant. But we know that observation 
and memory differ with individuals, with 
ages, with specialization, above all with the 
training that educes habit. One sees and 
memorizes much ; another little. The child- 
mind is of clear plates, sensitized by heredity 
for this or that kind of impression ; the 
matured mind takes and gives, washes out, 
re-sensitizes ; the aged mind seems some- 
times to lose control, and faded plates, long 
since forgotten in the back store-rooms, come 
out unbidden. One person observes and re- 
members faces ; another names ; some both. 
There is a natural selection : we remember 
only for a day or a week what we had for 
breakfast or dinner, but for years a face, a 
voice, an odor, a kindling thought, a key-fact. 
27 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

The memory becomes trained to forget some 
things, to remember others. Education should 
exercise this perspective, in the cultivation of 
habit. The eye, the ear, the inward sense, 
need to be trained to note, to consider, to 
record, worthily. There should be inten- 
tional differentiation between observing and 
remembering. The modern newspaper makes 
the mistake of attempting record of all the 
pettinesses of a day — an impossible and 
worthless task. The modern education must 
see and shun this serious error. Selection, 
not collection, should be its aim. 

And in true education each life must be 
Individual- trained after its own pattern. Each child 

dren f Chil " has the ri g ht t0 be treated as itself » b Y parent 
and by teacher. The farmer does not treat 
alike potatoes, corn, wheat ; sheep, cow, 
horse. The gardener will not bed together, 
nor treat alike, his roses, his lilies, his or- 
chids — nor will he treat alike one kind of 
rose and another. Each must be nurtured 
after its kind. But human seedlings do not 
come to us ready-labeled, like pots from the 
florist ; each life must be studied, to know 
the needs of its own character. Nature 
divines for us. In the light of general laws, 
the law of each child's life — temperament, 
28 



OF EDUCATION 

tastes, capacities, trend — must be separately 
discerned and studied. No two children, 
born of the same parents, are the same, or 
even alike, and this unlikeness is even more 
marked in the school than in the family. 
And throughout all education this unlikeness 
in likeness must be kept in mind by the 
teacher, in leading forth the faculties of the 
taught. All teaching should be individual Teaching 
in its personal application, though in its pur- fn^idual 
pose the same. While children of the same 
age study the same subject, as a part of gen- 
eral education, each must do his part in his 
own way. This the wise teacher, e-ducating, 
recognizes. The " grade " system needs to 
be tempered to individual temperaments. 
Instead of putting into one class the boy of 
ten who is eight years old for arithmetic and 
twelve years old for spelling, and the boy of 
ten who is eight for spelling and twelve for 
arithmetic, a " class " for arithmetic, by due 
arrangement of hours, should include those 
of certain advancement in that study, what- 
ever their mere age, and the grade certifi- 
cate should be given for each study and not 
by an impossible average which ignores 
differences. To reduce a class to physical 
uniformity by cutting the feet off tall boys 
29 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

and making them foot-stools for the short 
ones, would not be good practice. Natural 
selection should here also be recognized and 
emphasized ; and " over-education," that is, 
mis-directed education, prevented. It is not 
wise to try to grow a lily from a rose, nor a 
rose from a lily. 

Self-preservation "is the first law of 
The Order nature," and next in order of need is self- 
o Nee s maintenance, "earning a living." As the 
family precedes and is the unit of the neigh- 
borhood and the state, preparation for par- 
entage, rearing a family, should be assured 
before that for citizenship, the communal 
and political relation. In some measure 
Nature provides for all these in the instincts 
of the animal kingdom. Last, and pecul- 
iar to man, comes aesthetic development, for 
the gratification of individual tastes. This, 
Spencer shows, is the order in which know- 
ledges are of most worth, an order which 
schooling should regard in developing the 
child into the man. And this is likewise the 
order of a natural education, an education 
following Nature and developing according 
to her laws. 

For the instincts of Nature, fulfilled by 
30 



OF EDUCATION 

a wise physical training, provide first for The Order 
the preservation of life and health ; and for °. f Educa_ 
the occupations of the great body of man- 
kind, " manual training," the development 
of bodily strength and skill, of the eye, the 
hand, the physical powers, is now requisite ; 
and all this is physical or sense-education. 
Moral education must of course pervade all, 
but it is of paramount necessity in the rela- 
tions of parentage and citizenship, the home 
and the state, in which the sense of right, 
moral development, should be supreme. And 
intellectual education, the storing and train- 
ing of the mind, beginning in the first rela- 
tions with elementary knowledge of natural 
facts, and with the simpler processes by which 
art supplements nature, as drawing, writing, 
reading, measuring, figuring, — becomes of 
increasing importance in the later relations, 
with physiology, biology, sociology, philology, 
history, politics, economics, psychology, phi- 
losophy ; until, in final processes of culture, 
it teaches not only science but the fine arts 
which become personal "accomplishments" 
and gratifications. Thus a true education 
conforms in every respect with the several 
orders of development — within the child's 
mind, without in the requirements of life, 
3i 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

answering to that evenness of supply and 
demand with which Nature always balances 
her books. It proceeds from the simple to 
the complex, from the near to the far, from 
the like to the unlike, from nature to art, in 
the true procedure of the universal law of 
development. 

The basic education, of physical sound- 
The Kinder- ness, moral rightness, and intellectual true- 
garten ness j n p erce pti n of fact, is the field, after 

the mother's care, of the " child-garden." 
This supplements the care of parents, but 
can never supplant it. Here Nature's meth- 
ods of play and of imitation are used as the 
royal road to learning. After the nursery 
comes thus the kindergarten, in which, in the 
sunshine of play, the human plant is to grow. 
The kindergartner sees in the child literally 
a plant that is to be brought to flower. All 
plants need light, warmth, air, water, soil — 
the kindergarten recognizes that the light of 
truth, the warmth of love, must come to the 
unfolding of the little life. The true pur- 
pose of the kindergarten is to put the child 
in touch with Nature ; to let Nature take it 
by the hand and lead it forth, each little life 
after its own order of being or temperament ; 
to encourage the small seeker after truth to 
32 



OF EDUCATION 

ask questions of Nature and listen to the an- 
swers for itself. It is at once a praise of the 
kindergarten and a criticism of the " graded 
school," that the too methodic teacher con- 
siders the child of the kindergarten too prone 
to ask questions, too individual, not readily 
"drilled," " uneasy under school rote." But, 
on the other hand, the kindergarten is not 
merely for play, or a place where the child 
is to "have its own way." It must, above 
all, learn Nature's way, kind but also just, 
sweet but also stern, by no means "go as you 
please." So, in the games patterning real 
life, in drawing, modeling, weaving, basket- 
work, in the song that tells its story or points 
its clear but unobtrusive moral, the child 
must be getting not only simple knowledge 
and simple skill, but that moral discipline cari- 
catured in the makeshift of "drilling." As a 
"fad," without high purpose and sound method, 
the kindergarten is a caricature of education. 
That play is in itself natural education, and 
can be made the greatest of aids in teaching, The Teach- 
is one of the most important discoveries in mg ° ay 
the history of educational development, — 
the great contribution of Froebel. Nature's 
indications are often given in the child's own 
choice of play, for true play patterns the real 
33 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

affairs of life, with happy instinct, and gives 
a real education. The simplest games of 
children are well-nigh universal, found the 
world around, passing from one child-genera- 
tion to another, without written record or 
purposed teaching, as the Vedic hymns or 
the epics of Homer were passed on in the 
childhood of the world. The ball, the top, 
Toys the hoop, all are object-lessons in the proper- 

ties of matter and the laws of motion, giving 
in happy play dexterity to hand and accuracy 
to eye, and laying the foundation for a later 
knowledge of the science of motion. The 
reins, the toy-wagon, the miniature boat or 
locomotive, are means of unconscious train- 
ing. The boy's knife, the girl's scissors, 
the box of tools, are an introduction to prac- 
tical mechanics. The doll is a lesson in the 
altruism of motherhood. Presently the child 
begins to collect, and a collection of kinds 
of leaves, of woods, of insects, of feathers, 
of birds, of minerals, of postage-stamps, of 
coins, becomes to the keen parent, the alert 
teacher, a royal road to botany, to zoology, to 
geology, to geography, to history. Here, as 
elsewhere, Nature points the best way, and 
the easiest way. In choosing his play, the 
lad indicates the " calling " Nature gives 
34 



OF EDUCATION 

him. And if, by wise sympathy of parent 
and teacher, honor, fairness, kindness, manli- 
ness, are made part of the public opinion of 
children in play, "honor bound" and "no 
fair " become watchwords in life as well, and 
a solid foundation is laid for the civic virtues 
most needed in business and in the state. 

The child who, in the kindergarten, has 
learned to use touch, sight, hearing, rightly ; " Primary 
to speak carefully ; to do simple handy work, uca lon 
as in modeling, drawing, and weaving; to 
play wholesomely, — has the first and best 
outfit for human life, though he has not yet 
learned his letters. For these are but the 
symbols needed to record his thoughts and 
his speech. Mankind thought and talked 
before it wrote and read ; so also in the child 
— use, art, comes before rule, science. It 
is later in the years of training that the child- 
mind should attempt to master the artificial 
features necessary in education. To read, to 
spell, to write, are not natural endowments, 
but artificial acquirements. The child draws, 
makes pictures of objects, naturally ; but the 
degenerate pictures now arbitrary letters, 
conventionally associated with sounds, have 
no longer relation with natural objects and 
35 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

can be learned only " by rote." These let- 
ters mastered, the child applies them phoneti- 
cally, but must be " corrected " backwards to 
Learning the arbitrary idiosyncrasies of English or- 
Enghsh thoepy and orthography. Of all tongues, 
English is perhaps the least logical, and its 
" rules " in grammar are in great part an ef- 
fort to classify arbitrary and unrelated facts. 
Reading, writing, and spelling can indeed be 
learned in English, not in scientific analysis, 
but only as a hard-and-fast act of memory. 
Yet when the elements of orthoepy and or- 
thography are acquired, there is then a natu- 
ral way of development in unison, as each 
learner in turn reads while others write and 
perforce spell. Grammar comes last of all. 
It may be that the typewriter and some form 
of phonography will find place in our schools ; 
the Morse signs can be learned as play, 
and the phonetic symbols of Bell's "visible 
speech," the only alphabet logical and natu- 
ral, give a remarkable discriminative power 
in hearing and recording language, even of 
unknown tongues. Likewise in the field of 
mathematics, arithmetic and algebra, both ar- 
tificial forms of numerical expression, pro- 
perly follow instead of preceding the more 
natural geometry. 

36 



OF EDUCATION 

Each child should receive, in each period 
of schooling, "an all-round education," com- An Educa- 
plete so far as it goes, so that no time or S e c °™f~ ar 
force has been lost or wasted when the child, as it goes 
at any age, is withdrawn from school to ac- 
tive or passive life. And the order of studies 
indicated by the order of evolution of facul- 
ties still proves the same as the order of com- 
parative usefulness ; development continues 
to answer to need. In any stage of civiliza- 
tion all need, first of all, to observe, to think, 
to talk ; next, to read, to write, to measure, 
and to reckon. The child should be taught 
first the prime facts nearest home, in nature 
or in history, and as it learns to use tools — 
whether figures, words, or things — should 
master the simple before passing to the com- 
plex. The prime factors in every-day rela- 
tions of adult life with Nature and with affairs, 
with other men and in personal conduct, 
America plans to give to every child, within 
the years of compulsory education. Statute 
law, making sure that the child of ignorant 
or heedless or selfish parents shall not lose 
the chance it can have only once in life, pro- 
vides this primary education for all children, 
and " compels them to come in." 

Now the human being has the tools of 
37 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

The larger knowledge, so that it can work its way into 
Knowledge i ar g er knowledge. These avenues of elemen- 
tary education lead forward and open upward 
for the fit student ; and our free high schools 
and colleges should give to the youth who by 
proof of fitness earns the right of way, those 
opportunities for which he cannot yet pay 
except in promise of future service, but which 
if the door is not thus opened must be lost. 



Education 



Primary education is that of primary, of 
^Secondary universal, importance. A less number of 
children are sure of the next advantage, sec- 
ondary education, which is of secondary im- 
portance — the widening of the horizon of 
the individual mind by the teaching of facts 
outside the individual experience and there- 
fore to be had only through books or lectures : 
the knowledge of other lands, physical and 
descriptive geography ; of other times, his- 
tory, not in dates and names, but of vital 
facts ; of the wider facts of nature ; of other 
languages. This is properly "common- 
school education," and most if not all chil- 
dren should have it, with the extension of 
that manual training which gives to the body 
parallel development of knowledge and disci- 
pline. 

38 



Education " 



OF EDUCATION 

After this, and only after this, comes the 
" higher education," in high schools and col- '^Higher 
leges, t which fewer children can have, for 
which many children have little capacity and 
little need, which consists largely in the 
analysis and generalization of facts into 
knowledge of the general underlying laws, 
the science underneath the art, as the rules 
of grammar and the equations of analytical 
mechanics. The higher studies, in which 
the larger generalizations marshal innumer- 
able facts, otherwise useless in their isolation, 
into sequence and order, under the rule of 
the greater laws, afford the final discipline of 
the scholar. Key-facts, opening vast cham- 
bers of knowledges, are stored in the well- 
ordered mind ; no one can ever master all the 
books in a great library, but the student be- 
comes trained to know where and how to get 
what he wants. History, seen as sociology, 
in its great sweep of progress through the 
ages, has its mile-posts : we do not need to 
measure foot by foot. Biology, the study of 
life, has its great law of evolution : physics, 
the study of forces, has its great law of cor- 
relation and conversion ; each of the great 
realms of thought is illumined by the light 
of greater law. This is still general educa- 

. 39 



Specialized 
Education 



Elective 
Studies 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

tion, in which, while the individual tempera- 
ment of the child or youth must be consid- 
ered, in method and practice, the purpose of 
the teacher is to impart an all-round acquaint- 
ance with the general field of knowledge, so 
far as the pupil goes. 

Last of all, for the fit, should come the 
specialized education, the trade-school for the 
artisan, the art-school for the artist, the dis- 
tinctive school in the university for the stu- 
dent aiming at a profession. The special 
must be built on the broad foundations of 
the general, both in knowledge and in train- 
ing. 

With specialization, the principle of " elec- 
tion " of studies comes into play — and not 
before. The college, whether called academy 
or " university," has for its business, to teach 
as far as may be "something about every- 
thing," that the youth may be prepared to 
touch life on all sides and in any calling ; the 
special school, in the university proper, to 
teach as fully as may be " everything about 
something," that the man maybe specialized 
for his specific work in life. Thus, the col- 
lege professor of chemistry teaches his sub- 
ject as a part of general education, the typi- 
cal facts and general laws which every one 
40 



OF EDUCATION 

should know, the merchant in dealing with 
products, the lawyer in dealing with cases, 
the preacher in dealing with analogies ; the 
university professor of chemistry teaches his 
subject as a specialty, that his student may 
become a chemist or apply chemistry as a 
physician or a mining engineer. It is not 
until the student has rounded general educa- 
tion as a college "graduate" that he is best 
qualified to make choice of " elective studies." 
Otherwise, he voyages on unexplored seas 
without chart or compass, steering as best he 
can. A premature choice elects not between Premature 
specialties of knowledges but between " softs Choice 
and hards," as when " patristic Greek " at 
Harvard was taken not by budding theolo- 
gians but by those who " went in " for athlet- 
ics. But when the college has "graduated" 
the youth into manhood and made him ready 
to accept the responsibility of choice and 
life-aim, selection should be invited, not only 
of studies but of teachers, as in the German 
universities. The "born teacher," answer- 
ing to the need of each child, whom children 
"love to hear," should indeed be selected 
throughout the common schools as well as 
for the kindergarten and the university, but 
it is only as we reach the latter that so far it 
41 



Education 
tested by- 
Results 



Culture 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

has been safe to give natural selection by 
students' choice free play. 

Our "higher education" should produce 
definite results in higher morals and higher 
character, and it is self-impeached when it 
gives us tricksters or hoodlums. The happy 
effervescence of young manhood has need to 
bubble itself off in sports and fun, but the 
self-restraint which comes with the true dis- 
cipline of the scholar should prevent that 
over-stepping of the bounds of sanity and 
decency which gives to common uneducated 
brutality an example and excuse. The stu- 
dent body in our upper schools should be 
self-organized, self -governed, under restraint 
of its own public opinion, alert to the respon- 
sibilities of an aristocracy of scholarship, and 
thus prepared to bring into the body politic, 
year by year, clean, new blood capable of the 
highest service to the democracy from which 
its opportunity has come. 

The final education completes the whole 
man, with the " culture " which is as the 
flower to the fruit, the delight side of life, 
literature, music, art, the enjoyment of Na- 
ture. Here also the faculties are to be led 
forth, e-ducated, trained, to fullness of appre- 
ciation, an appreciation not of technical skill, 
42 



OF EDUCATION 

as when a painter admires the handling of 
a pigment, but of qualities of inspiration. 
This makes of life a garden in which, after 
the work-a-day toil of the field, there is 
rest. 

But " schooling " is not all of education. 
All life is education — outside of school and All Life is 
after school-days as well. The example of Education 
parents, the influence of companions, the 
abiding bonds of friendship, the touch-and- 
pass of incidental acquaintanceship, are all 
agencies of unconscious education through- 
out our lives. But on the men and women 
of education there is laid a duty of conscious 
education, of cultivating the art and the arts 
of life, that should lead them and those with 
them upon ever higher planes of knowledge 
and discipline and character. The state 
recognizes this in providing the public li- 
brary, which shall supplement and extend 
through adult life the opportunities of the 
school. But it is above all for the scholar, 
self-impelled, to develop his individual life, 
and thus his part of the common life, in full 
responsiveness to everything that is highest 
in life, " to hitch his wagon to a star," to find 
in affairs, in social life, in politics, in religion, 
alike, at once opportunity to apply all with 

43 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 



The Self- 
educated 



Rest and 
Re-creation 



which life has endowed him and new endow- 
ment for life to come. 

It should put to shame those who have 
enjoyed and not fulfilled the opportunities 
of schooling and the discipline of education 
that men and women, denied these opportu- 
nities and this discipline, have often devel- 
oped by the education of daily life a standard 
of noble character and uplifted living, far 
above that of many who have wasted their 
talents and belittled themselves. There 
have been artists who, lacking hands, have 
drawn pictures with their toes ; there are 
workers who, lacking tools, have overcome 
all disadvantages, made their own tools, and 
achieved their perfect work. All honor to 
such as these ! but let us not argue that lack 
of education, of hands, or of tools, has made 
them what they are. 

In education, for the youth and through 
adult-life as well, a great factor is rest and 
re-creation. Our busy age neglects what it 
most needs. We have gone daft for amuse- 
ment — it is a vice of the times ; but that is 
not re-creation. Nor is idleness, rest. Here 
also the happy mean is between the extreme 
which we reject and the extreme to which 
our pendulum swings. The victim of " cram," 

44 



OF EDUCATION 

with head-splitting ache and eyes red from 
the blood-congestion in his brain, his head in 
a towel and his feet in hot water, is no worse 
and no better than the hero of sport, his 
head cracked by blow or kick and with black 
eye and bruised body from the athletic field. 
We need to learn to rest. For we of to-day 
not only " murder sleep," but murder waking 
rest. The diversion of our busy thoughts 
into quiet is an unknown art. We cannot 
fold our hands or infold our spirits with 
quiet. The art of rest must be one of our 
educative arts of life. 

Thus in education, the law of Nature holds. 
Each right step, in the individual life, is Harmony 
found to be in harmony with the great laws ca < tion EdU " 
of the universe. All is in tune. Education 
has been so wrong in the past, so far from 
Nature's way, especially in its relations with 
democracy, that to many there is despair 
as to right education. But it is only within 
the past generation that mankind has reached 
that place in progress where real education 
is rightly discerned. Our progress since has 
been indeed wonderful and encouraging. 
Let us not fail of heart in this work for the 
future. 

45 




THE SCHOLAR 1 

AM to say some words on behalf 
of Alpha Delta Phi ; and because 
Alpha Delta Phi is meant to be 
a brotherhood of scholars, I ask 
leave to speak of " The Making 
of the Scholar, and the Use of Him." For 
this Fraternity, uniting in its chain of chap- 
ters the men of many colleges, is purposed 
to help other college influences in making true 
scholars and in inspiring true scholarship to be 
of use afterward in the world. 

This city is dear to it because here rests one 
A true true scholar, the founder of this Fraternity, 

Scholar Samuel Eells. His grave is a shrine to the 
men, now five thousand and more in active life, 
who know what his life meant, and means. It 
was a short life, it was not a famous life, but 
it was a life that has continued and has mul- 
tiplied its influence all these years since he 
died. It is one of the lives which show us 

1 Address on " The Making of the Scholar and the Use 
of Him," at the Fifty-first Annual Convention of Alpha 
Delta Phi, Cleveland, O., May 16, 1883 ; reprinted from the 
" Star and Crescent," June, 1883, omitting some passages 
specific to the occasion. 

46 



THE SCHOLAR 

that some things which are entirely true in 
science are not true, are not adequate, in the 
higher life. In nature, force cannot beget 
force greater than itself. But in human lives, 
how great, how infinite, is the force one vital- 
izing, inspiring life can radiate into other 
lives. There is a little book, an Alpha Delta 
Phi book, which tells this story well, and those 
of you who have read " Ten Times One is Ten 
Ten," a book whose wide and widening influ- Times 0ne 
ence is the best fulfillment of its own playful 
prophecy, may well have thought back beyond 
Harry Wadsworth, its hero, beyond our bro- 
ther Edward Everett Hale, its author, to our 
elder brother, Samuel Eells, who fell asleep 
quietly, after his short life, with little thought 
of the breadth and scope of his work, with 
little knowledge of the inspiration this one 
modest planning of his was to be to the 
thousands of men who were to honor him in 
his grave. I call him above all a true scholar 
because he had the faith, that work tells, 
which nature teaches the scholar ; and the 
hope which the far vision that looks beyond 
the discouragements of to-day opens to the 
scholar ; and the loving-kindness to his fel- 
lows that belongs also to true scholarship. 



47 



OF EDUCATION 

All this he meant by Alpha Delta Phi. All 
this we are to mean by Alpha Delta Phi. And 
I think I cannot better honor his memory, 
and speak more fittingly in this place, than by 
asking you to consider with me the scholar, 
and how we are to get him, and how we are 
to use him. 



Who and what is the scholar ? He is the 
The man — or the woman — who has been able to 

Possession ac ^ t ^ ie knowledge and the experience of many 
lives to the little knowledge and the little ex- 
perience any one short life can win for itself. 
Indeed no child is born which is not indebted 
to father, to mother, to generations beyond, 
to the whole world before him, for vast, uncon- 
scious stores of life : always the present owes 
to the past, its mother, a debt it can pay only 
to the future, its child. But the scholar ob- 
tains, consciously, an over-share of this world- 
experience, and with it responsibility for his 
privilege. For generations past, and in many 
lands, the scholars who have been before him 
have been smelting and refining from crass ig- 
norance and crude fact the riches of know- 
ledge which are his fair possession. And with 
him the scholars of his own day, his every-day 
48 



THE SCHOLAR 

teachers, "passing along the torch one to 
another," labor to show him how best to use, 
to apply, these riches, to turn mere money of 
knowledge into realized and productive wealth. 
I wish to say this in the plainest English and 
without metaphor : The difference between 
the educated and the uneducated men, who 
start even, is that the one has got into the 
working forces of his life the real value of 
what other men have found out about nature, 
and about human kind, and about life in gen- 
eral, and that the other has painfully to get 
such little as he can for himself. 

I say, you will please note, "who start 
even." For the mistake is a common one of Starting 
comparing the uneducated man of self-con- even 
tained vigor and stout common sense with 
the fool or weakling on whom education has 
been thrown away. I shook hands at church 
the other day with a negro, who had been a 
slave, who had not learned his letters till after 
the war, who had educated himself, and who 
had come North to plead the cause of an edu- 
cational work for his own people, of which he 
was the head. In five minutes he told his 
story, and when he stood at the door, hat in 
hand, as he was not ashamed to do, his hat 
was filled. I had listened not long before to 
49 



OF EDUCATION 



What 
Education 
cannot do 



a bishop, coming from a missionary field, a 
man of education, who had to tell one of the 
noblest stories that can be told, the work of a 
man at an outpost of religion and of civiliza- 
tion ; and he droned ineffective platitudes for 
near an hour — and got nothing, it may be. 
It was the slave and not the bishop who de- 
served honor — who deserved it all the more 
from educated men, from scholars, because of 
the plucky fight he had made against all ob- 
stacles, to obtain such education as he could 
for himself. If this were fair test for the 
scholar, education had the worst of it. But 
it was not. Nature had done more for the 
slave than education could do for the bishop. 
There is an impression too common among 
certain classes, that scholarship produces a 
moral or intellectual dry-rot. If that is the 
general effect of education, education is a bad 
thing. But it is not fair to judge a calling 
from its failures, nor to impeach scholarship 
from Bachelors of Arts in whom the spirit 
of scholarship can prove an alibi. Nothing 
more can be said for education than that it 
helps out — leads out, as the word implies — 
what there is in a man : it cannot put brains 
into him. It cannot grow stores of wheat 
from soil of stone ; though it may better poor 
50 



THE SCHOLAR 

soil and make good soil productive many fold. 
But if, taking two boys of equal capacity at 
fourteen, you will set the one to the old- 
fashioned, orthodox training of sweeping out 
the merchant's store, and will give the other 
five years of sound education, you will find 
the educated man at twenty-one catching up 
and at twenty-five going ahead of his less 
fortunate fellow. The scholar, truly defined, 
is the man to whose original capacity educa- 
tion has added knowledge, training, an experi- 
ence beyond his years. 

The making of the scholar, then, is one 
of the highest tasks to which society can set The 
itself. It is the glory of America that it J^ sSfolL 
has built the base broadly. We have come 
to question the glowing generality of the De- 
claration of Independence, that all men are 
created equal ; but the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence has meant to us that America should 
do her best to provide that, aside from the in- 
equalities of birth, of position and of riches, 
every child shall have the best chance possible 
for an equal common school education. We 
have, indeed, been much in the dark about 
early education, as we have been much in the 
dark about many things, but a scholar among 
scholars, Herbert Spencer, has been fore- 
5i 



OF EDUCATION 

Early most in leading us out into the daylight of 

common sense. We find that those things 
which the child can learn earliest and easiest 
are the things which every child most needs 
to know. We begin to see that curious, talk- 
ative, imitative childhood, question-asking but 
grammar-hating which used to be connected 
with original sin, is prompted by Nature, best 
and most blessed of teachers, thus to find out 
how to observe accurately — " the lead pencil 
is the best microscope," said Agassiz, and 
children delight to draw ; how to think fully ; 
how to talk clearly, and so to write and to 
read, which are prime factors of scholarship 
as well as first outfit for those to whom 
further privileges are denied. So, as we fol- 
low Nature, presently we find that many 
things have been learned which we did not 
know we were teaching. And many bug- 
bears disappear, especially the fear that there 
are nowadays so many things to know that 
there is not time enough to teach them ; 
though, to quote Emerson's "Red Jacket," 
we have " all the time there is." Nature, we 
find, has arranged these things for us ; these 
new knowledges lead one into another, as 
each link in a great chain fits with its neigh- 
bor ; if we learn Nature's book in the right 
52 



THE SCHOLAR 

order, the most difficult pages become easy in 
the light of those we have learned before. 
Thus the boy of fourteen may know more, 
with less work, with less wear and tear, than 
the boy of sixteen in the " golden days " we 
sigh for. When the engineers opened across 
the mountains the great iron ways that unite 
the East and the West, they followed Nature's 
guidance, in the streams, as far as she would 
lead them ; it was only when these clues failed 
that they rapped at the closed doors of the top- 
most places and broke their way through the 
rock. To borrow the engineer's language, we 
are beginning to educate in the lines of least 
resistance. 

This gives a great advantage in our day for 
the making of the scholar. The boy comes The College 
to the college better equipped — so soon, at Functlon 
least, as the middle schools respond, as they 
have not yet fully responded, to the progress 
above and below them — and the college, re- 
lieved of some of its old work, knows better 
what, when and how to teach him. More- 
over, the college is beginning to know better 
its own province, which is to make the stu- 
dent a scholar, and not, as is the province of 
the university, a specialist. For the scholar 
is, in the old phrase, a man of parts, and not 
53 



OF EDUCATION 

a partisan ; not the narrow man who has only 
one side to him and can look at affairs only 
from one point of view. Therefore, his busi- 
ness is to become a rounded man, who touches 
knowledge at all points of the compass. To 
produce such men, the college must recognize 
and accept its proper function, and not ape 
the university, with its quite different func- 
tion — more specific, less wide. The graduate 
of a college should be a man, knowing the 
knowledges, knowing himself, fitted to play 
well whatever may be his part in life. Being 
thus a scholar, he goes from the college to the 
university, if he is to be a "professional " man 
— and the professions now include many 
specialties — to train himself for his special 
part. 

There has been in this country an unfortu- 
College nate confusion between these two functions, 
sitv Umver- and many colleges have done harm to them- 
selves and to their cause by calling themselves 
universities when they are not universities. 
The university may include a college, but 
as a university it is other than a college. 
We need many colleges ; we can have but 
a few worthy universities. The university 
should be a great center of intellectual life, 
where in great libraries and with great col- 
54 



THE SCHOLAR 

lections and under the specific guidance of University- 
great specialists, the few men may prepare ment l0P " 
themselves to know all there is to be known 
about the one thing they make their life- 
work, be it theology, or law, or medicine, or 
philosophy, or electricity, or the investiga- 
tion of Nature in any of her phases, infinitely 
many, yet each infinitely great. This is a 
privilege not for all men or for all scholars ; 
society does not need that all should be in 
this sense specialists. But the college is for 
every man — every man who can ought to go 
to college ; and the college and its graduates 
must count it a privilege and a pleasure to bid 
God-speed to the university. In our city of 
New York, the trustees of Columbia are at 
last doing what they should to make this 
magnificently dowered home of learning a uni- 
versity worthy of the name and worthy of the 
metropolis it should adorn ; I take it that my 
own college, supported as it is by the city of 
New York, should look with no jealousy, but 
with sincere congratulations, upon the devel- 
opment at the hands of private citizens of a 
great university, which shall relieve it of a 
task it ought not, perhaps, to undertake, and 
shall offer to its graduates the advantages 
they have had to deny themselves or to seek 
55 



Courses 



OF EDUCATION 

in other places or in other lands. And we look 
to the great West, multiplying its colleges, to 
concentrate on its universities, that Harvard 
and Yale and Columbia and Cornell and Johns 
Hopkins may find, not many and weak imi- 
tators, but friendly rivals sufficiently few to 
match their present or prospective strength. 
If then it is for the university, to quote 
Elective again an oft-quoted phrase, to teach everything 
about something and so make the specialist, 
it is for the college to make the scholar by 
teaching something about everything. In a 
reasonable sense, this should be the scholar's 
endowment of knowledge. Elective courses 
have thus little, if any, place in the college, 
while the university course must be essentially 
elective. A student must first learn the round 
of the knowledges before he can decide what 
particular knowledge is best to serve him : 
and it is only the experts, the college faculty, 
who can plan out for him what constitutes a 
fair representation of the circle of knowledges. 
"Will you then have smatterers ? " By no 
means. If a man by learning much is to know 
nothing, by doing many things indifferently 
is to do nothing well, by becoming versatile is 
also to become aimless — this is all bad, and 
recklessly bad. This is the key, — that good 
56 



THE SCHOLAR 

teaching is not a matter of quantity but of The Round 
quality ; not so much of what is taught as of ° e( j~e° W " 
how it is taught. No man can know his mother 
tongue fairly without knowing something of its 
mother tongue and of its grandmother tongue; 
and to drop Greek, that fine flower of exact 
speech, out of the curriculum, is to leave edu- 
cation incomplete. But we don't want a boy 
to learn only Greek and not English; or only 
language and not nature and the mathematics 
and the laws of reason. For each study offers 
some useful specialty of training, and throws 
light upon some other, and cross-questions 
some other, and makes the others more easy 
to learn ; so that at last with a curriculum 
approximating our fuller knowledge, we have 
learned more in less time. When the student 
is sent to Plato and his dialogues of Socrates, 
let him take his logic also with him, and while 
he admires the purity of Plato's Greek and the 
loftiness of Socrates' philosophy, let him not 
fail on the other hand to cross-examine the dear 
old philosopher out of the brazen effrontery 
with which he sets up his men of straw to 
give him ready-made answers. 

For thus knowledge becomes wisdom. The 
two are not the same. Knowledge is but 
the raw material of wisdom : and it is the fur- 
57 



Training 



Student 
Self-gov- 
ernment 



OF EDUCATION 

ther business of the college in the making of 
the scholar to teach him to apply his know- 
ledge, to be wise. This is training. And 
much training has been denied to college stu- 
dents by the wrong theory of college work 
arid college government that has prevailed. 
A college student must learn to think for 
himself : this is what a man must do — and 
where shall the man learn if not in college, and 
how shall he learn if not by practice ! Fore- 
most in my own college I honor that instruc- 
tor who once gave up a full hour's " recita- 
tion" that a single student might "think 
out," aloud, to the benefiting of the class, a 
mathematical axiom he made bold to question. 
Here was a true teacher, who knew that one 
truth thus thoroughly thought into the mind 
developed an activity and avidity in learning 
beyond weeks of text-books glibly recited off 
by rote. The one is cramming and dyspep- 
sia ; the other is the sound digestion of know- 
ledge into wisdom. 

The like is true in college government. 
Here are young men, approaching voting age, 
who are expected presently not only to gov- 
ern themselves but to help to govern a coun- 
try. Yet we police them under a paternal 
and despotic government, and teach them 
58 



THE SCHOLAR 

trickery and riot and rebellion. I remember 
when in my own college days some few of us 
undertook, in honesty and good faith, to or- 
ganize some measures of student self-govern- 
ment, the Jovian wrath with which our un- 
meant treason was visited by our president ; 
and his sentence upon myself was the denial 
of my Phi Beta Kappa key until the proffer of 
it came too late. It is one of the great strides 
in American colleges in the past few years 
that Amherst and others with her are teach- 
ing their students to become good citizens by 
requiring them to govern themselves. 

But there is something more than rounded 
knowledge, and something more than practi- Noblesse 
cal wisdom, which goes to the making of the lge 
scholar and which should be expected from 
the college. I mean that inspiration of schol- 
arship which should prove so strong a motive 
force in after life. It is a question not of 
matter, not of method, but of men. Every 
college man ought to get it into his very sense 
of scholarship that he is one "passing the 
torch along " from the men before him to the 
men after him, from the men above him to 
the men below him. Privilege is responsi- 
bility ; noblesse oblige. This cannot be taught 
out of text-books ; it can be taught only by 
59 



OF EDUCATION 

The College the kindling lives of true men. It is here 
President that the co u ege pres ident should find his 

opportunity — not as constable, as chief of 
detectives, as police justice in a community 
of culprits, but as a man calling upon men for 
their manhood. So Arnold of Rugby called 
upon his sixth form : " When I have confi- 
dence in the sixth form," he said, " there is 
no post in England which I would exchange 
for this; but if they do not support me I 
must go." They did support him, always ; 
men will always respond to a man. There is, 
indeed, no place on this great earth where 
that indefinite but efficient quality of man 
which Emerson calls character so tells, as at 
the head of such a congregation of bright, 
ardent, receptive young men as constitutes a 
college community in America. The college 
president can no longer be a Dry-as-dust who 
sees only through a microscope or a telescope, 
and has no sympathetic vision for the life at 
every-day focus about him. He must be a 
living power, a fountain of force, inspiring his 
faculty, winning for them the opportunity 
to do their best, inspiring his students with 
emulation of his own manhood. You will 
think of many men of this kind — and of 
many men of the other kind : the difference 
60 



THE SCHOLAR 

between a live college and a dead college, a 
college that turns out live men or that turns 
out animated corpses, is often the difference 
between a man at the head and a dummy. 
Scholarship should be an inspiration — and 
there is no inspiration like a man ! 

We have thus reviewed some of the fac- 
tors in the making of the scholar. If I have The self- 
seemed to make the tacit assumption that scholar 
the scholar is solely the product of the col- 
lege, let me here admit the exception which 
illustrates the rule. All honor to the self- 
made scholars, who have won for themselves, 
with pains, the attainments we of the colleges 
can less boast of, because we reached them 
by the royal road. Honor everywhere to the 
true scholar, honor the more to the scholar 
who has attained per aspera astra ! 

II 

Given, then, that the scholar is produced, 
wide of knowledge, " well informed," wise The Use of 
with training, inspired to high motive — how e Scholar 
shall we use him ? how, rather, shall he use 
himself ? For the scholar should lead, not wait 
to be led : it is for that he has been educated. 
The gift is the call. In what field, to what 
purpose, shall he who has this experience and 
61 



OF EDUCATION 

training and inspiration above most men be 
expected to apply it ? If he does not apply 
it, he is the waster of ten talents. There is 
no intellectual crime greater than the blase 
contemptuousness of the pseudo-scholar, who 
will let the world go by, as ill as it will, and 
bother himself in no wise about it. 

The true use of the scholar, I take it, is not 
The Scholar at all that he shall choose what is called a 
the L racti " profession, but that in any calling he shall 
show breadth of thought and trained efficiency 
of practical work. For it is the scholar who 
is truly the practical man. Fore-warned is 
fore-armed : the knowledge he has gained of 
what other people have done before him, in 
affairs of state or in the happenings of every- 
day life, is his safeguard against mistakes 
he also would otherwise be making. The 
most ^practical man in the world to-day is 
the man whose experience is bounded by his 
own horizon ; the farmer who won't cover his 
hay when the signal service reports a storm, 
because he don't yet see the rain-clouds in 
his sky. There is no more curious misuse of 
words than this phrase of " the practical man " 
to designate the unpractical person who pre- 
fers not to know what other people can teach 
him. 

62 



THE SCHOLAR 

I think there is another sense in which the Limitations 
scholar of to-day is practical — the willingness 
to put aside the old questionings of the un- 
questionable, to confess that certain problems 
of metaphysics lie beyond the limits of human 
reason. "Thus far and no farther shalt thou 
go," he recognizes in psychology as well as in 
Nature. Questions of nominalism have lost 
interest for him. Of those mysteries which 
transcend human reason he is content not to 
reason. There is to him a certain significance 
in those pleasantries of the past : " What is 
mind ? No matter. What is matter ? Never 
mind. If Bishop Berkeley says there is no 
matter, then 't is no matter what Bishop Berke- 
ley says." 

He will not impeach the ego and deny iden- 
tity, and float off in the dark without rudder Agnosti- 
and compass for a journey through a universe €lsm 
which may not, to him, exist. The human 
mind, he sees, must accept as fact that to 
space, to time, to matter, there must have 
been beginning or no beginning, there must 
be end or no end. One of these must be true ; 
but neither can even be thought by the finite 
mind. We will therefore not attempt to rea- 
son of them, nor will we complain that the 
universe was not made some other way in- 
63 



OF EDUCATION 

stead of this way, that evil combats good, that 
man was not made perfect and complete. It 
is this tendency of thought which produces 
agnosticism, of which we hear so much. But 
agnosticism must itself be tempered by the 
scientific habit of mind, as it is applied to 
these higher things. The agnostic cannot 
be also the atheist : if he will not believe, he 
cannot disbelieve. The humility of the true 
The Humil- scholar must make him reverent before the 
Scholar ° First Cause, the unknowable, the unthinkable : 
he will do his best in the world he knows 
without attempting to deny the Creator or 
to play the Creator for himself. To search 
into the created universe for the informing, the 
helping, the bettering of his fellow-men is 
still his chief business, and let him never for- 
get that as the vision of the imagination in its 
scientific use penetrates into the infinitely 
little and sees with "the mind's eye" 'the 
ethereal vibration and the final atom, so the 
eye of faith, transcending reason but not de- 
spising its analogies, may seek to look above 
the clouds, toward the infinitely great, the 
infinite beyond. 

I should say, then, that the chief use of the 
scholar is to apply the broad sight to every- 
day affairs. This is his service to his race. 

6 4 



THE SCHOLAR 

The astronomer sits in his tower watching the Applica- 
stars through the big eye of his telescope, scholar- 
The great earth rolls him round : his tube ship 
sweeps the universe. He is alone with the 
stars ; he seems to have nothing to do with 
his fellow-men. " What has he done for his 
kind ? " What has he not done ? He has 
taught us that " the world does move ; " he 
has taught us also to detect adulterations in 
our food when our grocer tries to cheat us. 
The spectroscope and the polariscope with 
which the scholar questions the far-off stars 
are to-day every-day servants in the most 
commonplace affairs of life — the preparation 
of our food, the collection of revenue. The 
Genius of electricity, like him of the Arabian 
Nights, is bottled in a Faure accumulator, and 
will presently have to do our bidding in run- 
ning the sewing-machine or turning the spit. 
Benjamin Franklin, bringing lightning from 
the heavens with his child's toy and with his 
lightning-rod protecting homes and churches, 
is the abiding type of the scholar, hesitating 
at nothing that he may serve his kind. 

Whatever, then, be the calling of the 

scholar, it is his business to be better of his 

kind than the man who is not a scholar — the 

broader clergyman, the truer lawyer, the 

6 S 



OF EDUCATION 

The Scholar keener doctor, the stronger teacher, the more 
Man ettCr f ar - s ig nte d journalist, the merchant who 
knows better the laws of trade, the manufac- 
turer who better appreciates the relations be- 
tween capital and labor, the farmer who by 
scientific treatment of his land gets more out 
of it without exhausting it, and does n't cut 
down all his trees. The clergyman who has 
learned from history how religious wars have 
served the Devil's cause and drenched the sad 
earth with blood must begin to see that it is 
for him to call men to agree in their lives 
rather than differ in their creeds, and if he 
touch life at many every-day points, as the 
scholar should, he will tell the merchant, for 
instance, that putting foreign taxes on domes- 
tic goods is not altogether compatible with 
the Decalogue. The doctor who has learned 
how all parts of the universe act and re-act 
upon each other will not stop short at the 
surface symptoms of disease, but will go back 
to the sources of vital power and, prescribing 
Tightness of life as the only panacea, the key 
to the good or ill we leave also to our children, 
finds himself at once preacher, teacher and 
healer. But not less the merchant and the 
manufacturer, the " traders " who give us the 
products of the earth where we require them 
66 



THE SCHOLAR 

and shaped to our wants, need the wider view The wide 
of the scholar. These " middlemen " deal View 
with the great problems of exchange, of capital 
and labor, of supply and demand, which are 
the most pressing and in some respects the 
most threatening problems of this our day. 
If anywhere a man needs wide knowledge and 
all the experience history can give him, it is 
here. If Labor, again as before, smashes the 
spinning jenny because it is to make less work, 
or refuses to accept apprentices because that 
makes more hands to share the same pay, or 
seeks by disastrous strikes to bite off its own 
nose to spite the face of Capital, here is the 
call for the patience, the wisdom, the justice 
of the scholar, who can look from another 
point of view than his own, who can look with 
kindness and sympathy upon the mistakes of 
ignorance, who can show what these mistakes 
are, and convince from actual cases in the past 
that the workingman is presently the better 
off because of the machines he would break 
or the increasing labor to which he would 
deny opportunity. It is for the scholar to 
point out that present loss is future gain, and 
in this great question of industrial relations he 
finds most noble field for his best efforts. 
Passing beyond the professional man, we 

6 7 



OF EDUCATION 

The Scholar reach the farmer, the great producer, the 
Farmer human agent in the chemistry of Nature by 
which dull matter becomes the food of life, 
the man upon whom all the rest of us depend 
for the first conditions of existence. " Will 
you have him also a scholar ? " Yes. For 
generations indeed his lot has been among the 
most narrowing known to mankind. Wedded 
to the soil, his tendency has been to become 
inert, like the soil itself. The American 
farmer has taken a step beyond and above this 
dull living, but the true development of agri- 
cultural life is yet to be worked out on the 
broader lines of the scholar. The farmer, to 
make the most of his land, must be something 
of a chemist and of a naturalist and of an 
economist : he must know what his soil can 
best produce and what elements it lacks ; what 
are the conditions of plant and animal life ; 
what are the conditions of supply and demand 
in the world's markets which he serves. 
These things the farmer has learned, by hard 
experience in greater or less degree, since the 
world began : but now education begins to 
save him the hard knocks as machinery has 
begun to save him the dull work. Here as 
everywhere the educated man pulls ahead. 
The farmer needs also to know something of 
68 



THE SCHOLAR 

the economics of government, for it is on his 
broad back that taxes are piled to make other 
classes rich, and he cannot afford to be fooled 
as he has been by delusions that promises to 
pay are wealth and that a people can be made 
rich by robbing Peter to pay Paul. " Would 
I idealize mere farming ? " No ; I would sim- Practicalize 
ply practicalize the scholar. Here is a great the Scholar ' 
calling, which must always be followed by a 
great part of mankind : of the 14,400,000 male 
workers in our country, 7,600,000 are set 
down by the census of 1880 as agriculturists. 
There is nowhere more field for intelligent 
improvement, and intelligent improvement 
may lift the life of the farmer nearer and 
nearer to the ideal life. Of a hundred mer- 
chants, it is said, not five escape failure in the 
course of their business career; men forget 
this as they look upon the great fortunes of 
the five. The farmer's life is a dull life, but 
it need not be a dull life. And is it not the 
scholar who contains in himself the most re- 
sources against dullness — within his books, 
wise and delightful companionship ; in his 
knowledge of Nature, a wellspring of delight ; 
in his relations with his " hands " the best op- 
portunity for the j oy of helpful service. Alone 
on his farm, or in the more perfect rural com- 

69 



OF EDUCATION 

munities already prophesied, the educated 
man, away from the worry and haste and tu- 
mult of great cities, will find his compensa- 
tions. Assured by better knowledge of con- 
ditions a surer and more abundant livelihood, 
the facilities of modern travel give him the 
broadening opportunities of the wider world, 
and it is an easy prophecy that many of the 
problems which perplex our civilization — the 
gravitation toward our crowded cities, the 
surplus of non-producing middlemen — are to 
find their solution in the scholar on the farm. 
For I think there are to be seen, amidst 
Reaction the discontent, the restlessness, which charac- 
Content terize our generation and our country, signs 
of the times that already show a reaction 
toward content. We begin to see that the 
man of colossal fortune is one who comes into 
port from seas where many fleets are wrecked ; 
and the man of colossal fortune himself begins 
to see that out of his goods he can get so 
much good and no more. One of the Astors 
is reputed to have said that he could enjoy 
out of his estates only a fair salary for taking 
care of them. And in Wall Street men will 
tell you that despite the great fortunes, the 
speculator averages no more, and often less, 
than equal brains would earn in work that 
70 



THE SCHOLAR 

produces value instead of, for the most part, 
destroying it. It is before America to de- 
velop a political system that shall really be 
" the greatest good of the greatest number ; " 
an economic system that shall not make " the 
rich richer, and the poor poorer ; " a social 
system that shall produce content. Room for 
the scholar here ! 

Nor let us forget the scholar in the home 
— the woman educated to think alongside The Wo- 
the man, to keep him to high aim by her in- ofholar 
telligent inspiration. And if there were no 
other call to the woman to use the opportu- 
nities of higher education newly opening be- 
fore her, there would be all-sufficient motive 
in a fit preparation for the education of her 
children. How shall the mother do her part 
in forming the mind and the character of the 
child unless she has taken the scholar's pains 
to learn how the child mind develops and by 
what methods and in what order knowledge 
is to be taught ? It is for the mother first 
that Pestalozzi and Froebel and Spencer have 
queried Nature. To inspire the present, to 
mould the future, is the divine task which is 
set before the woman as scholar, if she will 
but accept her opportunity. 

Finally, the scholar ought to be the better 

n 



OF EDUCATION 

The better citizen. Here is " the scholar in politics," of 
*' 1 lzen whom in these latter days so much has been 
heard. Certainly there is no place where 
the scholar is more needed, nor is there yet 
danger of too many of his kind there. Yec 
here also he is now accepting his work. And 
his opportunity has come with his willingness 
to use it. We no longer hear so much about 
prigs and Pharisees and " Sunday-school poli- 
tics : " the despised " amateur politician," edu- 
cated, has been outgeneraling the professional 
politician, uneducated, on his own chosen field 
of battle. The man who is really willing to 
work for something outside himself has an 
enormous advantage in this very practical 
sphere of life. "The leaders lead/:" the 
leadership of educated and unselfish men is a 
fact fixed in the constitution of the universe. 
It is only when they fail to come to the front 
— and to stay there — that the misleaders 
mislead. This is a responsibility the scholar 
cannot throw off, for his plea of the hopeless- 
ness of improvement is only confession of his 
own apathy or his own timidity. I grant you 
that the scholar has often been timid, that he 
has too often talked more bravely than he has 
acted. But I say that is treason to scholar- 
ship : who, if not the scholar, shall have the 
72 



THE SCHOLAR 

faith that moves mountains? Is it not he The Scholar 
who knows that infinitely small atoms make in Polltlcs 
the big world, that one point of light radiates 
influence through the universe ; he who can 
trust with certainty the educational methods 
of political progress ; he who can see far land- 
marks of history and make sure that the world 
does progress ? Let " the scholar in politics " 
have the faith and the pluck and the persist- 
ence to do the work that calls out to him ; it 
is for that he is a scholar. And let us hope 
that the " scholar in politics," the scholar 
everywhere, is more and more to have an 
opportunity of proving his use to his fellow- 
citizens, his fellow-men. The scholar, edu- 
cation in person, is the pillar of the free state. 
His name may not be known, — that is not 
his business, nor yours, — but his work tells. 
And the scholar knows that though he die, 
his work goes on. 

" Unto each man his handiwork ; unto each his crown, 
The just fate gives ; 
Whoso takes the world's life on him, and his own 
lays down, 
He, dying so, lives. 

* Whoso bears the whole heaviness of the wronged 
world's weight, 
And puts it by, 

73 



OF EDUCATION 

It is well with him suffering, though he face man's 
fate ; 
How should he die ? 

" Seeing death has no part in him any more, no power 
Upon his head ; 
He has brought his eternity with a little hour 
And is not dead." 



74 




THE COLLEGE OF TO-DAY 1 

JN this new city, at the junction 
of two great rivers, where the The Found- 
iron highways of the land meet cSleee 
the highways of the water, des- 
tined by nature to be the center 
of a great industrial community and the depot 
of a great internal commerce, and dedicated 
by you in wise forethought to the health and 
best life of that portion of mankind which 
shall here make its dwelling, — you desire to 
crown and complete your wholesome system 
of free education with an institution which 
shall offer to your youth the opportunities of 
the higher learning and, by at once centralizing 
and radiating a wise culture, shall conduce to 
the intellectual health and wealth of your com- 
munity. 

And the first question that meets you is : 
Is it wise to do this at all ? are the most of 
people better citizens and better men and 
women for possessing this higher culture ? 

Now it must be admitted that a college can 
do harm and that culture may be a bad thing. 

1 A supposed address before citizens of the city of 
Hygeia, proposing to found a college ; reprinted from the 
" Princeton Review," January, 1884. 

75 



OF EDUCATION 

A false Not a true college or a noble culture, mind 
you ! But it has become an axiom among 
philosophers that the finer a thing is the more 
vile is its corruption. Also a tool is the worse 
for being a good tool, if it be used for bad 
ends. The finest skill in moulding and tem- 
pering steel may be put into a burglar's jimmy. 
So, then, if culture be but a carping and inac- 
tive criticism, in the nature of a chronic and 
irremediable disease that sees the world only 
through jaundiced eyes, and if a college pro- 
duce this culture, it is unutterably a bad thing 
that you should found such a college and 
possess such a culture. If your college is to 
sap the vitality of men, to wither their brains 
by spring-forcing, to make them know so much 
that they avail nothing, to send forth gradu- 
ates who are a perpetual sneer at their less 
learned betters, then let us have no colleges. 
But are we thus to slap civilization in the face, 
and because animals can run into evil courses, 
become vegetables which cannot ? This in- 
deed amounts to throwing up the game of life 
and admitting that the world is worse off the 
older it gets ; we will take to the woods, and 
play innocently again with our fathers, the 
monkeys. I do not so read the Bible, or his- 
tory, or Mr. Darwin ; indeed, it is the business 

76 



THE COLLEGE 

of the true culture to point out the landmarks The Equip- 
that verify progress, to add to the experience Experience 
of the individual the experience of the race, 
to prove that no effort is possible without its 
result — and no result possible without effort : 
to send the young man out into life equipped 
to make a place in it, and with faith which 
shall never grow old that whatsoever of good, 
however humble, he puts into the world shall 
abide in it forever. That there are college 
weaklings, as there are weaklings everywhere, 
is not to be denied ; but it is the purpose and 
mission of the true college to add " strength 
to strength." Its graduate is to be a wider 
man, of deeper resource ; if a farmer, a better 
farmer, at all events a better citizen and a 
better man. So far as this result is not pro- 
duced, it is the fault of the man himself, of 
training that is bad instead of good, or of the 
social and political conditions into which he 
emerges. Some of these elements in a present 
difficulty we may not at this moment consider, 
but let us here agree that it is not culture, 
but its abuse that is at fault. In a word, the 
question is not, Shall we have colleges ? but, 
Shall we have good colleges ? It is resolved 
just here into, What kind of college shall 
we have ? 

77 



OF EDUCATION 

A College It is well to bear in mind, first of all, that 
proper as a p art £ g enera j education you want a col- 

lege, and that you do not want a university. 
I use the words not in their historical sense, 
in which the college was one of the halls 
of the university, nor in their etymological 
sense, in which college means a body of men, 
particularly students, collected together, and 
university a place where universal learning, 
the circle of the sciences, is taught, but in the 
modern sense into which they are clearly dif- 
ferentiating. According to this view, looking 
upon the university as a collection of special 
schools, including also, it may be, a general 
one, the college is the place where one goes 
to learn "something about everything," and 
the university where one goes to learn, in this 
or that of its professional schools, "every- 
thing about something." We may keep this 
in mind by the fancied etymology that college 
means a collection of knowledge and univer- 
sity the turning of all knowledge to one end. 
In this sense the great schools of this country 
— Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Michi- 
gan — are universities, with the peculiarity of 
having as their originating center each a col- 
lege proper. Now there is no objection to 
this, except it be the tendency in these great 



THE COLLEGE 

institutions, desiring to make all the use pos- College and 
sible of the great scholars who as university Universit y 
professors center there, to confound the col- 
lege course with the university, as by the 
adoption in their colleges proper of this very 
system of elective studies ; but there is an 
objection, brought out clearly by this distinc- 
tion, to the colleges, on the other hand, at- 
tempting to be universities. This is one of 
the weaknesses, perhaps the one weakness, 
which brought obloquy upon the " fresh- water 
colleges," and particularly the small colleges 
of the West. They were pretentious, for one 
thing, — a high school was often a State Uni- 
versity, — whereas the first duty of scholarship 
is to be honest and modest ; and they set their 
graduates the bad example of attempting to 
seem more than they were. It is the business 
of a college to be a college and of a university 
to be a university ; and we shall see that while, 
from the nature of things, there is need of 
and can be, worthily, but few universities, 
great and rich centers, there may be colleges 
everywhere, so long as they are not so small 
or so poor as to be ill fitted for their work. 

The university, to quote again a happily 
put dictum of education, is to teach everything 
about something; that is, the professional 
79 



OF EDUCATION 

The m schools of which it is composed are to do this 
Umversi y £ Qr ^ e [ r respective students. For this pur- 
pose a great center of learning is needed, 
with great facilities, where specialists will 
reside and where great libraries and museums 
may be collected. The professional schools 
unite for this. Hither comes the man of gen- 
eral education to aim himself for his special 
work in life, and here he selects the courses 
and masters best fitted to give him the tech- 
nical education he requires. His fellow-colle- 
gian, not dedicated to the learned professions 
or to special science, goes meanwhile to the 
farm, if he is to be a farmer ; to the machine- 
shop, if he is to be a mechanician ; to the 
counting-room, if he is to be a business man 
— each, when he enters his special field, bet- 
ter qualified because of his college education 
to succeed in his peculiar calling. The col- 
lege does not aim ; it makes ready the gun 
to fire true when it is aimed. It completes 
general culture, by teaching everything about 
something. It takes the young man before 
he is ready to do something in particular and 
makes him ready to do anything in particular. 
In particular, let me emphasize, not anything 
or something in general. It is peculiarly 
necessary, therefore, that the college should 
80 



THE COLLEGE 

recognize and enforce from the start, what the Limitations 
university man must see for himself, the lim- Teaching 
itations of human knowledge. If you will go 
into the woods and throw yourself down by 
the first hand's breadth of turf, and consider 
for a few moments the infinite play of life 
that there is about it, the putting forth of 
the leaf, the flitting of the insect across it, 
the dew and the winds that water and tend it, 
you will learn for yourself that there is more 
in the smallest segment of nature than a life- 
time of man's infinite mind will suffice to 
know. A cursory examination of the tariff 
bill will teach the same thing as regards trade. 
This is the first lesson that must be learned. 
It is indeed impossible to learn everything 
about however small a something, or very 
much about anything. The college, then, 
must refrain from attempting to teach too 
much, else it will succeed only in teaching 
nothing. But a well-educated man needs to 
know at least the general relations of all 
knowledges ; full equipment and concentra- 
tion are the keys to happiness and success. 
The college gives one, the university the other. 
This discriminates at once between the work 
of two classes of teachers : the university pro- 
fessor of chemistry, a great chemist, teaches 
81 



OF EDUCATION 

his students to be in some measure chemists ; 
the college professor of chemistry, or the de- 
partment in which chemistry is included, per- 
haps not a chemist at all, teaches his pupils 
the general principles of the science, its rela- 
tions to other sciences and to life, and uses 
its methods toward the general development 
of the intellects under his charge. The col- 
lege course is a general education ; the uni- 
versity course is a special education. 

Now general education is a question of the 
General vs. subj ects to be taught, special education is a 
Education q uest i° n °f tne person to be taught. The one 
depends on what is known, the range of pre- 
sent knowledge, which is not an individual 
matter ; the other depends upon personal 
choice of a life specialty. A chief purpose of 
the general or college education is to afford 
that comprehensive view of the world of know- 
ledge and activities which shall enable the 
student to make intelligent choice of the 
special field to which his tastes lead him and 
for which his personal qualities fit him. But 
what this general education should be, he has 
not the means to decide. Others must deter- 
mine that for him, and these others must be 
those already acquainted with the wide field 
of general knowledge — educated educators. 
82 



THE COLLEGE 

From this point of view elective studies have " Elec- 
properly no place in the college course ; they cofleffe" 
are an infusion of the university idea into the 
college, and they have the decidedly bad effect 
of encouraging the American tendency to 
" save time " by crowding general education 
into fewer and fewer years so as to put the 
boy "at his work " at the earliest age possible. 
It is a heritage from the old idea that to be- 
come a good merchant a boy must not go to 
college, but begin by sweeping out the store. 
We give little enough time for preparation as 
it is, without college authority for the forcing 
process. It is of course alleged, as the plea 
for these elective studies, that they are in- 
tended to prevent forcing, to save the student 
from attempting many things he cannot do, 
that he may do well the one thing he chooses 
to do. But this is at once a surrender of the 
principle of general education, a confession 
that knowledges have already increased be- 
yond our powers of classification. The elec- 
tive system is the device, in fact, for eluding 
the difficulties of a transitional period, in which 
knowledge has taken a surprising leap, so that 
we do not yet know how to handle the new 
results. But the key is given in the simulta- 
neous growth of that power of analysis and 

s 3 



OF EDUCATION 

generalization which, selecting only typical 
details, displays the more clearly the great 
principles and relations of arts, sciences and 
letters. The history of the world can yet be 
written in one volume, and more satisfactorily 
than of o]d ; though with our present accumula- 
tion of facts no number of volumes can fully 
cover a single administration. Our dilemma 
imposes a difficult task upon the governors of 
our colleges, but let us not admit that a man 
can no longer be well educated. 

The duty imposed upon the college, then, is 
Thorough- one of self -limitation on the one side and ap- 
ness proximate completeness on the other. But 

let us not be charged with forgetting that 
education is something more than knowledge. 
Knowledge in itself is naught ; it is useful only 
when applied as wisdom. It is more impor- 
tant that a man's mind should be a good tool 
than that it should be a wide storehouse. 
That is just the design of the college course. 
The extreme classicists look with alarm upon 
the incursion of the natural sciences, because 
they fear that in the multiplicity of subjects 
studied there will be no opportunity for thor- 
oughness in any one. Their mistake lies in 
forgetting that thoroughness is not a quantity, 
but a quality. Nothing more influences the 
84 



THE COLLEGE 

development of character and the direction of 
activity, personal or national, than the methods 
of thought ; the philosophers of England have 
been perhaps quite as effective in her material 
development as her legislators. It js all the 
more important, therefore, that the methods 
taught shall not be one-sided, that the scien- 
tific method and the literary habit shall be 
placed side by side. And as far as thorough- 
ness is concerned, as to use, no one requires 
it more than the physical experimentalist ; as 
to training, it depends after all more upon the 
teacher than upon the subject or the quantity 
of it taught. We may all agree, then, that 
the well-ordered college must open the store- 
house of general knowledge, furnish the key 
to its treasures, and teach their proper use ; 
it must, in other words, impart general princi- 
ples, inform as to the sources of detailed know- 
ledge, and train in correct methods of thought. 
The main question, then, between large and 
small colleges is the sufficiency of the faculty The 
to cover the wide field of general knowledge. FacuIt y 
The organization and relation of departments 
is the matter of prime importance, and if a 
college cannot command sufficient income to 
insure equipment in each, it must give way. 
The new college has this advantage over the 
85 



OF EDUCATION 

old, that while the latter holds to the tradi- 
tional division of departments that existed 
when natural science was only knocking at 
the door, the former may map out its division 
lines in view of the new and splendid acquisi- 
tions. In the light of the new demands and 
Depart- the old experience, the departments of an 
ments average college may perhaps be best mapped 

out as follows : — 

f Law — a proper chair for the President. 
J Historical Sciences. 
] Social Science and Metaphysics. 
l^Art. 

f English — which may include the office of 
J Librarian. 
| Ancient Languages. 
^Modern Languages. 
^Mathematics. 
< Mixed Sciences. 
L Natural Sciences. 

This scheme suggests, with the minimum 
number of chairs, a comprehensive classifica- 
tion of the subjects of study, in logical divi- 
sions. It recognizes three great groups, of 
what may be called social, philological and 
natural knowledges. 

86 



THE COLLEGE 

Upon the efficiency of the President de- The m 
pends the harmony and the completeness of President 
the college work, and his chief care therefore 
should be neither teaching nor police duty, 
but the exercise of his executive skill. A 
great educator will make his college great in 
its results and single in its workings without 
interfering with the individuality of the sev- 
eral instructors. And without the central 
control of a capable man, the college will lack 
the essential unity that should characterize it. 
The activity of present investigation is so con- 
stantly adding facts to each department of 
knowledge that each professor is as constantly 
pressing for more of the student's time, al- 
though his peculiar function is so to generalize 
these new facts into principles that he may take 
less time. In this continuing emergency, as 
well as in the many relations in which depart- 
ments or professors trench upon each other, it 
is the President who must hold tjie even hand 
of control and balance, while he takes means to 
bring the efficiency of each professor up to 
the standard of the highest by the improved 
methods he may suggest from one class-room 
to another. It is for him also, following the 
example of a distinguished American college 
president, to show to the students themselves 
87 



Tone 



OF EDUCATION 

the relations of the special departments of the 
curriculum to their general education. 

It is the President who must, more than 
College any one person, give its tone to the college, 
as Arnold did to Rugby; he must be the 
shining example of the educated gentleman, 
the " whole man," the man of knowledge, of 
enthusiasm, of moral force, who can inspire 
younger men and to whom they may aspire. 
To such presidents the American college sys- 
tem already owes much ; nor can any man 
desire a higher life-work than earned for one 
college president the sobriquet, quite as much 
in earnest as in kindly jest, of "Mark, the per- 
fect man." 

Your wise choice of a president, therefore, 
will be a first condition of success. Take care, 
when he is chosen, that his office is not ham- 
pered by the petty details of an officer of po- 
lice. Take care also that he is left otherwise 
free for his higher work. He cannot be every- 
thing else and the president too. But there is 
one department of teaching, requiring a mini- 
mum of the professor's and of the student's 
actual time, yet whose influence might be 
made the most vital, of which he may well 
assume the chair, — the department of Law 
and political (not economic) science. In this 
88 



THE COLLEGE 

department he may best prepare the student A Chair of 
to become a well-ordered thinker and a good w 
citizen. In the general sense of the word law, 
it would be his function to infuse the young 
mind with the sense of the universality of law, 
of the relations of natural laws underlying and 
harmonizing the several departments of know- 
ledge, and of the necessity of conforming the 
intellectual and moral powers, by the culti- 
vation of habit, to those fundamental laws by 
whose aid man reaches his highest develop- 
ment, against which man must gain but a los- 
ing victory. By such teaching the President 
may open the way for the highest usefulness 
of each department, and establish the most 
direct influence on the development of his 
students. He voices the highest results of 
the science and philosophy of our day, which 
concentrate their teachings in the one thought 
of the unity of law. 

The importance of the study of law in its 
specific sense, especially of the history of law, History of 
has been too much overlooked in our colleges. w 
Meanwhile most of our law schools, training 
men technically to become lawyers, have also 
subordinated that general and historical view 
of law which should properly form a part of 
general education. Yet the forms of law have 

8 9 



OF EDUCATION 

Education been one of the most important factors of 
m Law social development, and one of the most in- 
fluential agents in determining methods of 
thought. The educated man should certainly 
know the facts and the reasons of the devel- 
opment of "customary" law as the rule of 
earlier communities ; its gradual supersedure 
by the invention of statute law ; the wonder- 
ful influence of Roman law, the law of codified 
abstract principles, applied by the deductive 
method, in all modern thought ; the English 
system of " case law," following the inductive 
method, which is in direct competition with 
code law in the States of our own Union ; the 
relations of law and equity ; the growth of law 
by judicial and professional interpretation in 
accordance with the current development of 
institutions ; the rise and progress of inter- 
national law ; and the other phases of law 
which have made part of him as he is, and 
which underlie the facts he reads in his daily 
newspaper. All this might be taught in a 
very small proportion of the college time, and 
yet it is now scarcely taught at all. 

Following the same line, the work of this 
chair should include political science, giving 
the college alumnus that practical acquaint- 
ance with the growth of governments which 
90 



THE COLLEGE 

shall enable him to do his part as a voter in Political 
mitigating and shaping the " practical poli- Science 
tics " of the day. There is nothing more 
important to this country than that a large 
educated class should recognize the truth 
that government, of a great country or of a 
petty village, can progress only in the direc- 
tion of accord with the social and economic 
conditions which produce it, and the instinct 
of the practical politician which recognizes 
this principle by leading him to use "the 
materials at command " gives him an im- 
mense advantage over the doctrinaire who 
refuses to read past history or present facts. 
The educated man, again, ought to know how 
government has developed from the patriar- 
chal to the constitutional form, and the rela- 
tions of government to society in typical 
countries ; the rival bases of government, 
the basis of family, or race, at the foundation 
of ancient peoples, the basis of territory, or 
property, at the foundation of modern states, 
still producing conflicts which appear in to- 
day's journals under the guise of "the East- 
ern question," or discussions whether taxes 
should be laid on persons or on property ; the 
constitution of his own country, in its practi- 
cal workings as well as in its legal theory, and 
91 



Sciences 



OF EDUCATION 

the comparison it calls for with the constitu- 
tional system of England ; the historic view 
of the principles and work of parties whose 
conflict has produced our political history and 
the status of to-day. All this is quite pos- 
sible without dangerous partisanship, and it 
would do much to make the college alumnus 
an intelligent citizen. 

The Chair of Historical Sciences should 
Historical cover a vastly wider field than the old profes- 
sorship of history, and it is perhaps not too 
much to say that its methods should be dia- 
metrically opposite to the old methods. It 
may now almost be called the chair of the 
comparative sciences par excellence, so all- 
powerful has the comparative method become 
in their development. It should include com- 
parative philology, the key to history and the 
necessary introduction to the useful study of 
specific languages ; something of comparative 
mythology, and, finally, comparative history 
itself, traced from primeval man and ancient 
society through its manifold development into 
"to-day." It is not dates that are wanted — 
a dollar's worth of chronological dictionary 
can give them much more usefully than any 
memory — but the key to them. Properly 
taught, history is the experience of the race 
92 



THE COLLEGE 

added to the experience of the individual — 
an inspirer of faith, the key to progress. 

The Chair of Social Science and Metaphy- 
sics is, in its first-named division, closely con- Social Sci- 
nected with the chairs already named, and ence 
the three together afford an excellent example 
of the necessity of presidential control, which 
shall establish lines of demarcation and pre- 
vent controversy between the several depart- 
ments. In none of these departments are 
views absolutely settled; but while students 
should be fully warned of this fact, and thus 
taught to develop individual judgment, it 
would be most unfortunate to find professors 
of differing views waging war over mooted 
points in the border lines between their 
respective fields. Social science properly 
deals with general laws for which history 
furnishes the facts and principles. It is a 
still higher generalization, an abstraction from 
the philosophy of history. This includes, of 
course, economics (or political economy), on 
the teaching of which, especially in a com- 
mercial, self-taxing community, too much 
stress can hardly be laid. In the present 
view of metaphysics, that department resolves 
itself into the teaching of the history of 
thought, and the chief demand to be made of 
93 



OF EDUCATION 

the teacher is that he should present fairly, 
from the point of view of the author and 
under the light of modern discovery, the 
great systems of secular and theistic specula- 
tion — from the savage's simple conceptions 
through the magnificent dreams of Plato to 
the Evolution philosophy which colors the 
sunlight of the present day. It is in this 
department that the training in method of 
thought, i. e. y logic, has also place. 

The Chair of Art is on debatable ground. 
Art Yet I suppose it will not be denied that a 

man is not fully educated unless he has made 
some acquaintance with the flower as well 
as with the roots of human activity, not to 
speak of the enlargement of the faculties of 
observation and enjoyment which art know- 
ledge gives. The student should be taught, 
by lectures and by display of or direction to 
examples or copies, at least the principles, 
the history and the great achievements of 
the graphic and plastic arts, of architecture 
and, I should certainly say, of music, for the 
name and work of Beethoven has been of 
some importance in the world. It is mani- 
festly impossible, however, that practical 
education in these arts, which must be an 
individual matter, should form part of the 
94 



THE COLLEGE 

general education of the college. The rule 
still holds good, that the relations of any one 
art or science to general culture, rather than 
the practice thereof, are the concern of the 
college. An exception might be made in the 
case of drawing, although this should properly 
be sufficiently pursued in the school. It is 
now generally acknowledged that knowledge 
of art is an essential part of a completely 
educated man ; and so far as elementary prac- 
tice is essential to that knowledge, it should 
somewhere be given. 

The Chair of English, including language 
and literature, is of far more importance than English 
most of our colleges have recognized. Half 
a generation ago there was no such depart- 
ment, except in one or two pioneer colleges. 
But the intellectual and practical importance 
of thorough training in the full knowledge 
and accurate use of our own tongue, and of 
acquaintance with the treasures of its litera- 
ture, is becoming more and more recognized 
with each year. It is in this department that 
the modern ideas of education are revolution- 
ary from the old. Grammar, the analysis 
of speech for the discovery of its laws, was 
considered one of the elementary studies ; it 
is now known to belong properly to the ad- 
95 



OF EDUCATION 

vanced stage of education. The child learns 
correct speech by imitation and correction, 
not by the study of laws, which should be a 
part of elementary education only in so far 
as they are necessary to elucidate and assure 
practice. The child's attention should there- 
fore be directed chiefly to those external fea- 
tures of language to which its senses naturally 
open ; it is observation, memory, the sense of 
rhythm and other beauty, that should first be 
trained, by reading, the repetition of prose 
and verse, and by talk, which is the first step 
in composition. This basis being obtained 
in the schools, the college is ready to intro- 
duce the student to the analytical study of 
Related language. He must know the relations of his 
Languages mother tongue to other languages ; its direct 
origin in the Anglo-Saxon, whose elements 
should be given him ; the derivation of its 
words, with the careful training in synonymy 
which is alike the key to accurate thought 
and certain expression ; the laws of its con- 
struction, grammar and its departures from 
" general laws ; " the science of expression, 
rhetoric ; the history of the development of 
the language in its literature, and, finally, a 
philological knowledge of its authors and their 
leading works. 

96 



THE COLLEGE 

Within the province of this chair come also 
several auxiliary departments, notably com- 
position and oratory, the latter, of course, 
requiring for its practice a specially trained 
instructor. 

The Professor of English naturally holds 
also the Professorship of Books and Reading Reading 
insisted on by Emerson ; and even though the 
college organization permits a separate keep- 
ership of books, should be in the relation of 
the library to the students, the Librarian. 
Otherwise that important office is apt to be 
a keepership and nothing else, whereas it 
should serve one of the most important func- 
tions of the college. It is of course the 
business of each professor to acquaint his 
students with the literature of his depart- 
ment, and to stimulate a knowledge of these 
books ; but a general officer is also needed, 
who shall fulfill the high office which the 
leading librarians of the day recognize as 
theirs, — the development of taste in reading, 
of the easiest methods of actual work, and of 
a practical acquaintance with books as the 
keys to knowledge. It is an essential feature 
of the proper use of the college library that 
the students, under reasonable restrictions, 
should have access to the books themselves, 
97 



OF EDUCATION 

to the shelves. This helps to make the 
scholar a man commanding the sources of 
knowledge. It would be useful also if the 
librarian should make the library to some 
extent his instruction room, advising person- 
ally and particularly acquainting the stu- 
dent, through the methods and literature of 
bibliography, with the means of searching 
the world over for the books or book he may 
need. 

The Chair of Ancient Languages and Lit- 
Ancient erature is of course concerned chiefly with 
Languages L at m and Greek, the fountain-heads of our 
present secular culture, without which, despite 
elective systems, no man can rightly be called 
a scholar. Let us not, in the conflict between 
ancient scholarship and modern science, forget 
this, nor let us, on the other hand, overlook 
the fact that to speak or to write Latin or 
Greek is no necessary or desirable part of 
general education. Philological training is as 
important as, and no more important than, 
scientific training ; and it must not be forgot- 
ten also that philological training has been in 
good part transferred to the domain of Eng- 
lish. English synonymy is more important 
than Greek accentuation ; yet we still need to 
be trained in the subtleties of expression best 

98 



THE COLLEGE 

exemplified in the Greek aorist. The college 
knowledge of these tongues should include a 
reasonable (reading) acquaintance, especially 
with their laws of construction, through gram- 
mars and the authors selected as text-books, 
and a general knowledge of other authors con- 
nected with the development of the literature 
and life of Greece and Rome. The world will 
never grow so old that it can forget Plato, and 
yet, in a college paying not a little attention 
to long-since-forgotten details of Greek or- 
thography, a student may scarcely more than 
hear of Plato. This is no true scholarship. 
The Chair of Ancient Languages should also, 
taking up the work from the department in 
which philology is taught, give an outline view 
of that magnificently organized tongue, the 
Sanskrit, the mother tongue of our mother 
languages, and of that other speech, the He- 
brew, which connects us with another family 
of tongues and is the language of our earliest 
sacred books. 

The Chair of Modern Languages and Lit- 
erature must also recognize its limitations. Modern 
Spain, Italy and other modern countries have Lan g ua ges 
their languages, and the student should know 
where they belong, the character, relations 
and great names of their literatures, and thus 
99 
L.cfC. 



OF EDUCATION 

place them in his general scheme of culture ; 
but instruction must chiefly be confined to 
the great representatives of the Latin and 
Teutonic branches which flow together into 
our own tongue, viz., French and German. 
The construction of these languages, and their 
literatures, should be treated of fully, and, 
while the college cannot be expected to make 
expert conversationalists in French or German, 
it is natural and proper that living languages 
should to some extent be studied in practical 
speech. Here, as in English, one of the most 
useful methods, at the same time storing the 
mind with enjoyable treasures, is the memo- 
rizing and recitation of noble verse. 

The Chair of Pure Mathematics must be 
Pure Math- relied upon for that exact training required 
ematics especially in the exact sciences. Its teaching 
deals not with things, but with symbols, and, 
as a process of abstract reasoning, its study 
requires a mind well advanced into the reason- 
ing age. On the other hand, the observation 
of form, upon which geometry is built, is one 
of the first things to which the mind opens, 
and we need a portion of mathematics, arith- 
metic and much of algebra, early in the course 
of education, as a key to knowledge beyond. 
Between which lies this truth, that the facts 
ioo 



THE COLLEGE 

and properties of form as shown in ocular 
demonstration should be a part of the earliest 
education of the child, preparing him for the 
rational and exact proof left to the college ; 
that the use of figures, especially on the metric 
system, and algebraic symbols, including the 
practice of logarithms, taught much as the 
child learns the use of language, should be 
placed, for practical purposes, as early as pos- 
sible, leaving to the college the higher devel- 
opment of both. The college course should 
then include the higher algebra, arithmetic in 
the rationale of logarithms ; geometry, plane 
and spherical, in its analytic relations, and 
trigonometry ; and the science of the calcu- 
lus, taught on the newer rationalistic basis. 
At the head of this department should be a An exact 
patient and exact man, representing to the stu- Man 
dent the absolute certainty of mathematical 
method, anxious to satisfy honest inquiry to 
the utmost detail of exact proof, and not sat- 
isfied himself until his students are satisfied. 
That half -teaching which has been too com- 
mon in the pure mathematics surrenders the 
entire value of mathematical discipline. 

The Chair of Mixed Sciences has the special 
function of linking together the most abstract 
and the most practical results. Its educational 

IOI 



OF EDUCATION 

M:sed :k consists in proving this connection. It 

Sciences ^ ^ ]^^ D g professorship. It applies the 
processes ;: mathematics to the facts of phy- 
sics, and thus discovering and developing the 
great laws which control the universe, applies 
these in turn to practical usefulness. Its 
work is the great proof to practical minds of 
the direct value of science and education. So 
far as these have not been previously provided 
for in education, it teaches the facts of physics, 
static and dynamic, — sound, light, heat and 
electricity, in their relations to their source 
and to the human apparatus, and physical as- 
tronomy. The scientific study of acoustics, 
optics, etc., and of analytical astronomy, fol- 
lows, — in association with the final triumph of 
the mathematics, the analytical mechanics, 
which presents the equation of the universe. 
The application of mathematical principles in 
surveying and navigation and in constructive 
("descriptive") geometry 7 — the teaching of 
which associates itself, however, practically 
with the art department — concludes its work. 
Here must be a man who combines with 
breadth of generalization a keen sense of 
practical adaptation. 

The Chair of Natural Sciences teaches ob- 
servation, classification and induction. It 
102 



THE COLLEGE 

deals with inorganic matter and its transmu- Natural 
tation into organic life, through the round Sciences 
of chemistry, geology, botany, zoology. The 
facts of these the child should be led to teach 
himself, by observation and simple experi- 
ment ; the college work should complete the 
collection of typical facts, induce comparison, 
arrange classification and discover law. The 
department needs representative collections 
and satisfactory though simple apparatus ; and 
the student, in qualitative and slightly quanti- 
tative chemical analysis, and in the analysis of 
plants, should essay for himself acquaintance 
with scientific methods. I know in my own 
experience of no more useful college study, in 
cultivating habits of observation and careful 
judgment, than that of blowpipe analysis, 
conducted by the professor at the cost of a 
few inexpensive specimens and re-agents, and 
an apparatus of a watch crystal and a clay 
pipe. 

Such a curriculum, indeed, fulfills the round 
of knowledge, the circle of the sciences ; but The Round 
it is met at once by the severe criticism of J > L^e° w " 
practiced and working teachers, that it is 
theoretical and ideal, and not practical and 
possible. It is quite impossible, they object, 
to " cram " so much into the limited course of 
103 



OF EDUCATION 

" Cram " the average student. Professor Jevons has al- 
ready entered protest against the use of this 
word " cram " as a weapon against all innova- 
tions, and it may fairly be replied also that 
much of the memorizing of insignificant de- 
tails under the existing system is " cram " of 
a sort to which the word should be applied 
with obloquy. But the premises of these 
critics are entirely correct. It is true that, 
however knowledge grows, human nature and 
capacity, at least for any immediate term of 
years, remain much the same. We must make 
concessions to human limitations and imper- 
fections. Above all things, let us not increase 
"the noble army of smatterers," — those aim- 
less unfortunates who are " jacks of all trades 
and good at none." Let us not overlook the 
fact that wisdom is above knowledge, that 
training is at least as important as learning in 
the purpose of the college, and that concentra- 
tion is the final condition of success in life. 
On these premises, which are fundamental 

> t principles, all must agree. It is in their ap- 

plication that the mistake of the criticism lies. 
The natural conservatism of the professional 
mind misconstrues the nature of the suggested 
change. It is not proposed to increase the 
amount of mental exertion, but rather by re- 
104 



THE COLLEGE 

arrangement and better adaptation to decrease A well-or- 
it. Details are omitted here, that principles eralizatfon 
may be taught there, and under well-ordered 
generalization, founded on typical facts ob- 
tained during the early years of observation, 
culture becomes more complete and training 
more instead of less thorough. Each process 
of development, each method of reasoning, 
becomes a part of the mental outfit, and thus 
the well-trained mind possesses a comprehen- 
sive and well-organized plan, in which every 
after-acquired fact, law or experience may be 
assigned to its proper place and be the more 
easily assimilated by association. 

A second criticism asks whether the college 
ought, by demanding so much, to narrow the The College 
range of those who may enjoy its benefits ; Ed1uS?on al 
whether it should not give a less complete 
education to more people. This brings us face 
to face with the at present difficult problem 
of the relations of the college to the general 
education out of which its curriculum must 
proceed. It is noticeable that while there has 
been much activity in the improvement of the 
higher education, and much progress, follow- 
ing the suggestions of Froebel and Pestalozzi, 
in primary education, the intermediate educa- 
tion remains much where it was, and blocks 
105 



OF EDUCATION 

The Middle the road in the middle. Our common schools 
Schools are st jji u g rammar schools," although, as has 
been noted, educators are in agreement that 
"grammar," as such, is the one thing that 
should not be taught until the very highest 
grades are reached. And the colleges can- 
not do their proper work, nor can an approxi- 
mately correct curriculum be put into practice, 
until many features of the middle schools are 
not only reformed but revolutionized. The 
scheme of the proper education, following the 
child from its first lessons, should be developed 
in view of two chief conditions : the order in 
which the natural development of the mind 
fits it for the reception of successive stud- 
ies ; the practical fact that, since the number 
to be educated decreases each year beyond 
the early years, the essential subjects must be 
presented early in the course. Happily these 
two conditions largely coincide. The pre- 
sent curriculum of the middle schools has 
developed from the practical recognition of 
this last condition, in ignorance of the first, 
but through much misconception as to which 
are essential subjects. It is, of course, impor- 
tant that every child should be taught to 
speak, to write, to read, to figure, correctly ; but 
it is now known that the child learns correct 
1 06 



THE COLLEGE 

speech, for instance, chiefly through its ob- 
serving faculties, by imitation, and not through 
its reflective faculties, by study of grammar. 
The child develops through the what, the how, 
the why — first the fact, next its relations, 
lastly its causes ; and yet the lower schools 
will be teaching the laws of grammar, and 
leaving the facts of nature, as the elements of 
botany, for which the child-mind is hungering 
and thirsting, to the advanced student. The 
college professor of the natural sciences, for 
instance, should find the foundations laid for 
him when the student enters college, whereas 
now he must begin at elementary facts. A 
correct college curriculum is scarcely possible 
as middle education stands now. 

Recognizing, then, the fact that the order 
in which the mind can best learn is the order Reorgan- 
in which it can best be taught, it becomes of Education 
the utmost importance that the college, ad- 
mitting the necessity of present compromise, 
should exert its full influence to reorganize 
the education below. It must compel a high 
standard in the lower schools by the quality 
of its entrance examinations, for their sake 
as well as its own. The best baking cannot 
make good bread of poor dough ; and if the 
dough is rejected, the mixers will be more 
107 



OF EDUCATION 

careful how they work up the flour. The 
college will do no service by admitting ill-pre- 
pared youth — no service to them, certainly 
none to any one else. It is its business to 
act in general education as the controlling 
head — as the governor of the steam-engine. 
The plan of the college is of great impor- 
College tance ; but of still greater importance, practi- 
Disciphne ca v} Vj j s th e question of its theory and methods 
in its relations with students, their discipline in 
conduct and study. There are two opposing 
systems. The one considers the student still 
a boy, hedges him about with close paternal 
government, stimulates him with merit-marks 
for successful study, and punishes him with 
demerits for ill-conduct ; ranks him by exami- 
nations, rewards him with prizes dependent 
on his marks, and sends him out with a cer- 
tificate of excellence. The other patterns the 
freedom of the German universities (which do 
not correspond to our colleges), would treat 
the student as a man responsible only to him- 
self, permits him to be present or absent at 
his choice, and otherwise regards him as a 
free and independent American citizen. The 
one argues that the student must be trained 
to enter the world through close supervision 
and with immediate motives in view; the 
108 



THE COLLEGE 

other believes that he must learn before he The College 
enters the world that he must depend on him- Man 2 "" 1 
self. The tendency of professionalized teach- 
ers is to follow the first system ; and it must 
be admitted that the liberal innovators who 
have reached out toward the freer method 
have often been sadly disappointed in the 
practical results. Their students did not ac- 
cept the responsibility. But perhaps their 
failure came because they threw themselves 
upon an ideal method, not modified to conform 
to actual conditions. The truth is that the 
American college student is both boy and 
man ; he comes in a boy, with very little sense 
of responsibility, and yet he is often qualified 
to vote long before he takes his degree. The 
college, receiving him a boy, should send him 
forth a man. And it should treat him in view 
of his transitional character during this period. 
The college theory of discipline should con- 
template an increasing development of respon- 
sibility during the successive college years. 
You cannot successfully appeal to public 
opinion unless there is a public opinion to 
which to appeal ; and the failure to recognize 
this truism has been the cause of the disap- 
pointment of many liberal educators who have 
trusted to a sense of responsibility before they 
109 



OF EDUCATION 

Paternal have taken any pains to develop such a sense. 
Government And yet the unm i t i gatec i paternal government, 

with its fallible infallibility, into which college 
methods often return after spasmodic attempts 
toward a better system, has, it seems to 
me, been a great curse to this country. Col- 
lege students, removed from the associations 
through which they would naturally develop 
into political activity, are subjected, just as 
they approach the age of political responsi- 
bility, to a system of paternal government 
which, by practically assuming all the respon- 
sibility itself, destroys the sense of individual 
responsibility. "College politics," for this 
reason, often become notoriously corrupt, the 
field of mere bargaining among cliques ; and 
the college alumnus is prepared to take 
"rings "asa matter of course, and to assume 
that air of blast do-nothingism which has 
brought culture into disrepute. While, on the 
one side, our colleges have trained numbers 
of men to enter usefully into public life, they 
must, on the other, be arraigned for causing 
much demoralization. And now that our 
earlier training-schools, as the New England 
town-meeting, are losing their educational 
function, and the flower of our youth are more 



no 



THE COLLEGE 

and more seeking our colleges, this matter 
becomes of inestimable importance. 

What, then, are the relations which shall 
develop responsibility ? First, the central Absolutism 
college authority must be absolute and auto- 
cratic ; but it should never be necessary to 
exert its absolute power. It should represent 
to the student that absolute and inflexible 
natural law against which the man in active 
life throws himself in vain, which opposes to 
him the absolute resistance of a wall of rock 
against which the headstrong can only be 
dashed to pieces. This is the most important 
lesson the young soldier in life can learn, — 
the absolute necessity of obedience to moral 
and physical law. Let him be kindly spared, 
by this apprentice training, the severe pen- 
alties which unforgiving Nature must other- 
wise inflict. Now it is the misfortune of any 
paternal government that, in undertaking to 
do everything, it betrays itself into a network 
of inconsistent mistakes, which involve it in 
constant and weak compromise with individual 
cases and belittle all ideas of law. Moreover, 
Nature does not intrude her law. It is felt 
only when a man runs against it. Nature never 
" nags." The college authority, then, should 
be exercised seldom if ever ; but it must be 
in 



bility 



OF EDUCATION 

exercised, when need comes, with rigorous 
inflexibility, tempered by forgiveness only as 
far as mercy can safely temper justice. 

Secondly, this necessity of absolute law 
Student # should be forestalled by concentration of the 
hiHtv 0nSi " governing power upon the development of 
the sense of responsibility. If an upper-class- 
man has not a sense of responsibility which 
may be practically appealed to, I say boldly 
that it is somehow the fault of the college 
authorities. You cannot at once expect it in 
under-class men, just out of the school lead- 
ing-strings. Arnold of Rugby defended, 
against a public opinion strong in his day and 
overwhelming now, the two English abuses 
of whipping and fagging. Why ? Because 
they seemed to him a part of his one purpose 
— the development of a true responsibility in- 
stead of a false independence. His younger 
boys were yet boys, and he kept them de- 
pendent as fags upon the sixth-form scholars, 
that they might call forth the sense of respon- 
sibility in his upper men, who were respon- 
sible only to him. It was his way of saying 
that "the leaders lead." If the sixth form 
did not support him, he used to say, he must 
go. But they did support him. He had cre- 
ated a public opinion which never failed to 

112 



THE COLLEGE 

honor his appeals. And what he did in Student 
modeling Rugby school according to English ^e mment 
responsible aristocratic government of his day 
needs to be done in our colleges in accordance 
with our system. The students should be in 
the main self-governing, as Fellenberg made 
his boys. Demerit-marks — a fine levied in 
the college currency — may be necessary in 
the lower classes, but there should be stead- 
fastly developed a student feeling which may 
be trusted to take upon itself the punishment 
of misconduct, either by tacit public opinion 
or in some organized method, as a wrong done 
to the student community. The superfluous 
energy which now finds its escape to the cost 
of the weakest disciplinarian of the faculty 
might then be absorbed by finding " an ob- 
ject in life." Kindred questions admit a like 
solution. Prizes and marks, considered as 
achievement, instead of the symbol of achieve- 
ment, are bad : here is the root of that com- 
mon distemper which confounds money with 
wealth. This is a matter, again, of student 
public opinion ; and student public opinion 
should be within the reach of the faculty, 
if the faculty be wise. Examinations, it may 
be added, stand on a basis of their own, use- 
ful for the grasp of subject a general review 
US 



OF EDUCATION 

Examina- imparts, but still more because they repre- 
sent to the student, as Professor Jevons has 
pointed out, those crises in life in which all 
that has gone to make the man finds at once 
its test and its opportunity — supreme mo- 
ments, it may be, in which the whole life 
finds its focus. Their influence may be the 
more important when no marking system has 
preceded them, since there is nothing more 
vital than that a man should learn to conduct 
his daily life in view not of immediate but of 
ultimate ends. 

A college thus widely planned, officered 
by men who can inspire as well as teach, with 
a student body self-disciplined and eager for 
advancement, cannot but be a blessing to any 
community by which liberality is fostered. 
The student body in particular, neither rioters 
nor young prigs, should be as helpful as now 
often it is harmful. And the faculty should 
give to it, and to the community, their help 
and their example. They should be a band of 
working scholars, not hesitant to take their 
part in outer life, and eager to instruct and 
inspire beyond the limits of their class-rooms. 
It is for them to bind together with their 
influence the microcosm of student life and 
the macrocosm of the outer world. 
114 



THE COLLEGE 

Such an institution will not fail to produce Reverence, 

for us that temper of mind, derided rather Enth ?? i ": i . 1 . 
. , , . ■ . asm, Faith 

than encouraged by a culture less wise, m 

which efficient work must find assurance ; the 
temper which results from those cardinal 
virtues of the soul, — reverence, enthusiasm 
and faith. These, and the need of them, a 
wise training, catholic and wholesome, must 
emphasize. That grateful reverence which 
finds in the less favored but fruitful past the 
seeds from which the happier present flowers 
— a reverence venerating age; that respon- 
sible enthusiasm well ordered to direct its 
divine desire for the present help of human- 
kind — an enthusiasm honoring manhood ; 
that patient faith, the prophetic reward of 
daily toil, which sees in an assured future the 
ever-perfecting fulfillment of this imperfect 
yet sufficient present — a faith recognizing in 
every child the possibility of the supreme 
man ; — such reverence, such enthusiasm, 
such faith are the fruit and the seed of a true 
culture, vital to progress and to the welfare 
of mankind. 



115 



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